Getting Too Old For This
by ManMadeOfLasers
Summary: Harry Potter finds himself, and his normal bi-polar luck, pulled out of a quiet retirement and into the limelight of the 23rd century. He finds a grand new stage upon which his 'saving-people-thing' can act, and before he can say no, is pulled into the middle of a galaxy-spanning conflict. Rated 'M' for bad words and ideas, re-worked and re-posted. Enjoy.
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1**

* * *

 **Voyager Cluster, Ganges System, Akuze, Outskirts of Unnamed Capitol Settlement- 08.19.2177**

An injured, broken, and tired man is sitting on a massive tire at the edge of a settlement.

Not altogether unusual.

It's a big universe after all, and between Batarian slavers, murderous sentient computers, and Asari-Hanar pornography, there are a lot of things that could injure and break a man.

This sight was at least a little strange though, after all not many of the men in those scenarios would have some kind of organic acid dripping from them, and if they did, they certainly wouldn't appear as calm about it as this man did.

Beyond the man, and the acid, there were other things about the scenario that made it unique.

For one, the settlement behind him was entirely abandoned. From pre-fabricated, roof to hastily dug and ceramacrete covered basement, every home and office was empty of any kind of human life-form. Stranger still, there wasn't even solid evidence that humans had ever been there in the first place.

Sure it looked like any of a hundred other small colony sites, massive pre-fab buildings making up the bulk of the town, with small and somewhat crude ceramacrete structures built up around them. It was missing all the classic signs of actual habitation, though. No lost teddy bears, porn hidden underneath bunks, or discarded ration wrappers, it wasn't like everyone just picked up and left one day, but rather that no one had ever been there at all.

Of course that wasn't all.

For one thing, more local to the man, fires still burned in the broken remains of not one, but _two_ different tanks.

The man visibly suppressed a sigh.

For all of the M29 Grizzly's vaunted history throughout each of Humanity's glorious military actions in the greater galactic community, and for all of the work he had put into making the damn things run better than piles of sub-corporate grade crap, they sure had gone down quickly.

He wasn't even sure what was still burning at this point. It wasn't like the damn things ran on petrol, so who the fuck knows.

A small command tent still mostly stood 500 meters out from where the man sat. The kevlar-composite that made up the walls was shredded to high heaven, but somehow it still held enough structure to still loosely look like a tent. The other rapid deployment building, the man's now former barracks, was less fortunate. In point of fact, it was now a puddle of dissolved fibers and bodies.

Oh right, the bodies.

The man had evidently done a bit of cleanup. You could still smell the coppery tang of blood in the stagnant air, and if you looked closely there were still drying pools of red-brown in the yellow clay of the field the settlement was built on.

Thirty seven body bags lay in neat rows before the man, a testament to not only how many had died, but also to the ten men and two women who weren't getting shipped home at all.

The backdrop for the whole depressing sight is a massive body, like some kind of demonically possessed snake, nearly three and a half meters tall and so long that even an idiot could tell that the twenty meters of it still above ground was only the tip of the beast.

A countenance like an alien nightmare stared down the man, like a snake wearing a voodoo mask four meters across, covered by chitin scarred by chunks of metal shot at .05% of the speed of light. But, just to give it that special 'what-the-fuck' touch, there were still exposed... sensory organs? It was unclear, the only thing the man could say with certainty is that they weren't exactly eyes, they started out blue, and when you sink a meter of sword into them, the creature bearing them dies.

Shit, his sword.

The man stood up, and gently shook the cramps out of his body. The acid which had been pooling in some of the crevices of his armor finally got its chance to heed the call of gravity, spilling off the small catches where it had collected, and immediately burning through the thick rubber composite of the tire he'd been sitting on.

The man ran a hand through his hair, just messing the black bird's nest on top of his head even more. He'd never given much thought to his appearance, but if anyone was watching and judging his scruffiness now, they could bugger right off.

Picking his way across the battlefield, the man crossed huge sections of disturbed ground where the massive worm thing had burrowed, like a great till had been set to the soil, churning the clay and leaving broken earth in it's wake. He passed blackened scars shot into the ground by the Grizzly's main guns, each shot a testament to poor turret rotation speed, and failure. The chitinous shell of the best was caked in the dark yellow clay of the ground, each plate of the thing's natural armor collecting the soil at it's edge.

With a grunt the man hoisted himself onto one of its massive scythe-like claws, each eight meters long if they were an centimeter. A part of him shuddered, it had cut through forty nine marines almost faster than they could react, each those claws proving much deadlier than than they had any right to be.

Climbing to the top of the body, he made his way to the head, with its disturbingly blue tongue-thing and somehow creepier sensory tentacles and panels. Locating his prize, the man wrenched his weapon from the great beast's face.

Rubies gleamed at the base of the hilt and from the edges of the crossguard, the hilt itself depicted an aged man bearing a scroll in one hand and a sword in the other. Etched into the blade was a name so old it had truly been lost to time, even the society that spawned the sword could no longer truly recognize it for what it was. But the man knew. Godric Gryffindor.

Piercing green eyes looked down onto the blade, marveling again at its construction. He had first used the blade at the age of twelve, then killing another monster, startlingly similar to the one beneath his feet.

With another grunt he dropped back to the ground, and made his way to the barely functioning comm system to make sure the distress beacon was still sending its call out to the Alliance Brass, and whoever else might be listening.

When he was sure the signal was still going out, the grumbling began, "...last god damn mission I let the send me on. 'Oh you saved Elysium, you broke the blitz, how can you say you're not qualified for this!'. As if my problem is qualifications! Take my commission and shove it so far up their asses they'll be coughing commendations for a month."

The man walked his way back to the tire he had been sitting on, only to find the acid from his armor had neatly severed the chunk he had been sitting on clear off of the rest. Still grumbling he kicked the thing over, exposing the axle that had once connected it to one of the Grizzlys.

"Never should have given that stupid Shepard bint my real gods damned named. 'Oh hi I'm Harry Potter.' Bloody idiot."

He fell silent for a time, staring back at the bodies set against a nice view of a ghost-town.

"You leave earth and defy the ICW for what? To get your nice farm on the first Post-Earth world all shot up by a bunch of over evolved bird-men. And you gave your stupid bloody name to them at Shanxi, of course they would still have it on file, fucking idiot, and of course she would bloody know it. Save one Merlin-be-damned colony from some stupid alien buggers and this is what you get."

The man shifted a bit on the tire but no matter how he moved, the severed chunk of axle still pressed uncomfortably into one of the butt plates on his armor. He kept shifting to find a comfortable spot, before giving it all up as a bad job. Standing with a scowl on his face, the man kicked the chuck of tire away and removed a pale wooden stick from what a custom chamber in his gauntlet. With a quick swish and jab, a puffy leather chair appeared, straight from a catalog of the La-Z-Boy Interplanetary Trade Concern.

The man sunk back into it with a groan of comfort this time, giving his butt a bit of a wiggle to burrow himself further into its cushioned glory.

"Harry old boy, you have to pick a better bloody colony. You buy a farm on Shanxi, the Turians hit it. You move to an apartment on Elysium, the Batarians knock down your door the next year. You join up for a year, and you get a pair of platoons killed. Bloody hell man."

The man raised an arm, and an orange gauntlet of light formed around it. Manipulating the holographic interface with his off hand, images of a dozen worlds floated in front of his eyes.

"Amaterasu, Bekenstein, Freedom's Progress, Cuervo is nice this time of year. Huh."

The man scrolled through a dozen more worlds and codex entries before one caught his eye, a nice pastoral world, well developed, protected, and quiet. In a word, perfect. All he needed to just disappear for a bit, buy a nice place out on the edge of the capitol, raise sheep maybe.

The man set a number of financial extranet requests to run as soon as he neared the next comm buoy. If he was lucky they would all get cached in the buoy before the alliance saw fit to implement his retirement and they'd get processed at the military priority channels. He might have a nice place already waiting for him by the time he got off this forsaken rock and debriefed.

With a brief look at the rows of bodies in front of him, his eyes hardened. He had lost a lot of people in his time. You don't live for one hundred and ninety seven years, and through innumerable uprisings, regime changes, and one outright inter-species war, without having a few companions get lost along the way. Forty nine more men and women weren't that big of an extra weight on his conscience.

This was why he hadn't wanted to sign up for service again. Sure, he did good work, he helped people, but he had a long and storied history of being the one man out of an investigative force of fifty to survive.

He sighed.

"Eden prime, here I come."

* * *

 **Exodus Cluster, Utopia System, Eden Prime, Outskirts of Constant, Potter Estate - 06.02.2183**

Harry James Potter, only son of James Charlus Potter and Lily Marie Evans, Boy-who-Lived, Man-Who-Won, Last of the Potters, former auror, former Director of Magical Law enforcement, alleged Dark Lord, four time Gold Medal winning champion bobsledder, Master of Death, and current Chief Gardener of Eden Prime's Planetary Council Manor stood on the porch of his home, looking out at the grounds of the estate he had purchased.

From his porch he could usually see the barest edge of the capital's spaceport, which he had spent many relaxing nights admiring behind a silencing charm. The take-offs and drop-offs each had a tendency to rattle windows, which was how he had gotten the land so cheaply, but with a pinch of magic, damn was it beautiful.

 _Right now_ all he could see is the bastard offspring of an Asari dreadnought and an old-Earth cuttlefish stepping all over his goddamn land and leaving massive bloody footprints _all over_ his goddamned roses.

It also seemed to be dropping massive waves of bipedal machines from hatches all around it's base. They didn't seem to have any problem jumping to the ground from sixty meters up, so he assumed they were bots. The giant flashlight shaped heads didn't hurt either.

"God _damn_ it."

* * *

[A/N]: On the off-chance someone notices this and tries to raise it as an issue, I am ManMadeOfLasers, and I was the original writer of this story. It was first posted on December 14th, 2014, written mostly while drunk and on vacation, and last year when I re-read it I hated it so much that I felt compelled to burn it to the ground and start over. However, instead of re-writing it, it sat on my hard drive for about a year and gathered dust, until I heard from another old fan that liked it and wanted to see it again.

I got inspired, and decided to actually do it.

To that end, props to BrigadierGnrlMayhem and Shikaku Zetsume, whose messages both got me off my ass and re-working this so it could be re-posted.

I hope everyone enjoys it, I'm still in process, but I'll post what I've got done.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

* * *

 **Petra Nebula, Vetus System, Elysium, Harry Potter's Apartment - 07.13.2176**

"FUCK! FUCK! SHIT! ARSE! DAMNATION AND HELLFIRE FUUUUUUUUUUCK!"

A high whine filled the stale air in the hallway of the prefab apartment, punctuated 750 times a minute by the staccato rhythm of a seriously pissed off Batarian firing an M96 Mattock. Harry clutched a moist towel to his otherwise naked form and ran for his life through the hall of his place.

"COME BACK HERE YOU FILTHY APE!"

If he had more time the irony of that statement would have amused him, but as it stood Harry's eyes stung like hell from the soap as he sprinted through his server room, into the second half of his home. His neighbors made fun of him for buying two pre-fabs next to one another and making it one big unit, but who was laughing now Gurdlesons? Shaking the remnants of his bubble bath from his head Harry dived over his bed and began furiously searching for something.

Above his bed the nice photo he had framed of his farm on Shanxi shattered as another hyper-accelerated metal pellet was fired through a wall into his room.

"Come on you asshat! That's the only copy of that photo I have!"

From the other side of his bed, and just outside the door to his room, a deep and gravelly response came, "It won't matter much WHEN YOU'RE DEAD, APE!"

Harry shifted a pile of shirts to the side, promising himself for the hundredth time to actually use his laundry basket, and underneath it was the sight he had been dying to see since his daily 'me' time had been so rudely interrupted not five minutes ago.

His wand.

With a smile on his face he took better cover against his bed, and sticking his wand out above his covers he yelled, " _Kontakte Lyn!"_

A bolt of raw electrical potential shot from the thin stick, lancing into the Batarian's assault rifle and arcing from there to his body. The four eyed man fried from the inside out, collapsing where he stood, steam rising from his body.

The smell left Harry feeling hungry for some reason.

Which left him feeling a little guilty for some reason.

Shaking that dark line of thought from his head, Harry calmly finished drying himself and put on his clothes. He hoped, he _really_ hoped, that some Batarian had just gotten drunk and decided the wall leading into his bathroom was too structurally sound and in the name of neighborly assistance it really needed a hole.

He knew that wasn't the case, but a man could dream.

/-/

Harry stood one step outside his door with his eyes closed. His pair of apartments were stacked with hundreds others, the individual buildings each made modular so they could be separated by miles to form outposts and farmhouses, or they could be stacked on top of each other like the complex he lived in.

Harry hesitated to pass any further from his door.

He knew there was trouble. He also knew that was far too late to avert whatever fantastic new bullshit he was going to have to deal with. So now he was going to have to go into battle.

Again.

But he was only one step out from his door.

Harry had cast selective silencing charms around his place to isolate himself from all noise above a certain threshold, or from particularly annoying sources. It meant that he didn't have to suffer from the nice sky-bike racer gang that rented out the bottom floor, or the goddamned Gurdlesons with their stupid/amazing stereo-system and penchant for Asari opera. The ward line for his charms was at two steps. Just one more and he would hear it all.

Then he would start running, and he would find a gun, and he would track down the nearest Alliance substation, and he would kill and save and it wouldn't be enough because he'd been doing this for over a century now and it was never bloody enough.

Harry Potter was so tired.

He took one more step out.

Gun fire: widely varying rate of fire and tonal volume suggest number of calibers and manufacturers.

Engine noises: similar level of variance, though not uncommon for the neighborhood this time of day.

Screaming: Too much. Regimented military strike would silence their targets if not kill them, too many and too consistent indicating screams were an objective not a secondary effect.

It struck a chord in him, he knew this style. The Death Eaters had used it often enough. These weren't military, they hadn't come regimented and in force, they were terrorists. This day and age, and given a bloody Batarian had shown up in his bath, that meant slavers.

He _really_ fucking hated slavers.

/-/

Two days later Harry shouldered his rifle, taken from an unlucky Private that no longer needed it, and popped up from behind a makeshift barrier.

He'd honestly never thought he'd be thankful for crashed air cars after Shanxi, but here one was, saving his life again.

Shots hit and shattered against the body of the car next to him, micro fragments from the pellets blasting the edge of his shields and making his kinetic barriers light up for a moment. One shot into the visor of what he was pretty sure was one of their captains, breathe, exhale, double tap into the exposed shoulder joint of the VORCHA WITH A ROCKET LAUNCHER- OH SHI-

With a distracted operator the rocket had no direction and spun high, passing less than a meter over his left side. Smoke from the fire burning in the wrecks that formed the battle-line got pulled into the rocket's wake, mixing with the off-white contrail as it whizzed past.

Harry turned as it passed to catch where it hit, the rocket's path spiraling outward until it hit a building at the end of the road, half a block away. It blew a hole into the facade, raining burnt and crushed creamacrete onto the line of retreating civilians, and scaring the ever-loving hell out of them.

He stared dumbfounded at the crater, not really seeing it. Harry was still reeling with disbelief that someone would give a Vorcha a rocket launcher. Vorcha very nearly did not qualify as self-aware, giving one high explosives was just asking for a problem! Especially given that he just took its arm out of commission, actually-

A boom reverberated deep in Harry's chest, shaking the building all around the battlefield and dislodging even more of the facade from the surrounding buildings.

Harry locked eyes with one of the local deputies and waved him back to the crowd of civilians crossing the intersection, they needed to get six more blocks over to reach their bunker. Harry had been very grateful to learn no one had seen fit to re-purpose those holdovers from the colony's earlier, and more paranoid days.

Risking another glance over the barrier, Harry saw exactly what he had hoped to see. Vorcha Demolitionist Number One had tried to fire again with its off hand and managed to fire a rocket point bank into the Batarian immediately to its right. These shits had either fudged the arming distance setting, or bought bad rounds, because the shot blew the four eyed terrorist into chunks. The whole battle line he had been holding off was still reeling.

" _Confrigissimo!"_

The good old siege engine curse.

A thick bar of butter-yellow light sprang from the wand he had drawn in his off hand, and impacted a small clearing about just back from the cover the Batarian line was using. The light hit the ground with all of the grace and kinetic energy of an old Earth rail train, blowing a half meter deep crater in the ground and driving the slavers into further disarray.

Harry took a breath and rested his rifle on the car he was hiding behind. Using it to steady his aim, sixteen shots cleared the skirmish line and gave their sector some relief.

"Kalinowski!"

One of the generic blue armored men that was helping the line of retreating civvies turned around and started towards Harry.

"Grab three and go police their side. Looks mostly clear, but watch your ass! There might be some heavy ordinance over there, salvage all you can."

Harry got a salute in response, and the man motioned to a few other armored people who quickly fell in beside him. They passed his position, scrambling over the line of rubble and crashed air-cars, and began picking over the fallen attackers.

They locals doubted him at first, and questioned why they should give a shit what some random civvie thought. It only took two or three attacks and a double digit body count for them to see the light.

Harry poked around his omni-tool and refreshed the local tactical net.

"Sector Report."

The map of the route to the closest bunker lit up in sections, green across the board. The actual combatants that had been in and around the city, mostly the local colonial garrison and a Marine groom's party that were currently setting records for a bachelor's party gone wrong, all gathered at the city's edge between the bulk of the civilian population and the main body of Slavers. Harry deliberately placed himself nearest that front guessing that he'd catch all of the sneaky fuckers who thought they could pass around the battle line and capture people.

It looked like he chose correctly.

One Lieutenant Shepard was leading the garrison and the marines at the battle front, and had proven to be both a blessing and a curse. She had been all kinds of annoying about the chain of command and where a random civvie (in her opinion, Harry scoffed, he'd been fighting evil since before her grandmother was a twinkle in someone's eye) stood in it.

It was almost enough to make him nostalgic for the old days, when all he had to do was say 'I'm Harry Potter' to get put in charge.

Taking a breath, Harry took a swig from a canteen he had filled… hell… at some point. It'd been a long few days.

Kalinowski didn't sound like he had gotten shot yet, so Harry figured the sector was probably still clear. Harry idly summoned a ration bar from the small pile the locals had assembled for this junction on the route to the bunker, and after shredding the wrapper began munching.

"SHEPARD TO POTTER, SHEPARD TO POTTER, OVER!"

Harry winced and suppressed the urge to just remove his communicator.

"This is Potter, what do you need? Over."

"YOUR ASS OUT HERE NOW-"

The transmission was interrupted by what sounding like a rather large explosion, and large-caliber cannon fire.

"-HALIAT IS BACK, AND HE GOT THAT DAMN GUNSHIP BACK IN THE AIR!"

Harry took a moment to splash some water from his canteen onto his face. The last time that damn Batarian showed up with his gunship, the front had almost collapsed. He needed to get out there now. At least he could be spared here, the retreat was mostly clear and the dead bodies behind him were probably one of the last hunting parties still on this side of the main line.

"Kalinowski! You got a something for me?"

Harry groaned and stood to see for himself.

"Found one un-cracked launcher right here, only the one shot in the barrel though, everything else went up with the rest of this stuff."

Harry jumped the barrier and collected the launcher, and once he had it he slapped the guy on the shoulder.

"Good enough. Watch'em for me, radio if it gets bad, hopefully I'll be back in a few hours."

/-/

With his last orders given, Harry turned and began jogging towards Shepard's last position. Apparating was well and good, but in a pitched battle he would just pop in front of a bullet and end his streak of not dying. He was getting pretty good at living and he would be beating himself up for months if he lost his record here to these wankers.

The gunship the Batarian commander was using looked like the soldiers on the front felt. Scrap metal made up most of the thing's tail and fuselage, and unless Harry's eyes were deceiving him, there was definitely an old fashion metal stop sign making up the bulk of the thing's port stabilizer.

Where in the hell did that Batarian son of a bitch get an actual metal stop sign? There were probably only two of those in the nearest thousand cubic light years. There _may_ have been one in the Elysium Museum of Humanity, but only _tourists_ went there and...

Wait.

That fucker broke into the museum and stole a god damn stop sign!

Harry had no idea why that pissed him off so much, especially in comparison to the sat images they had of the few hundred men and women the Batarians had in camps behind their side of the front. A detached and analytical part of Harry's mind noted that he had been pretty close to a number of explosions in the last forty-eight hours, and there was that time he got surprised and hit by that Vorcha's submission net...

Regardless of why, Harry raised the foraged launcher to his shoulder and activated the flight control VI. A small and pissed of caricature of a Vorcha face appeared in the holographic crosshairs, and it began barking out instructions for a successful launch in broken Batarian. Harry was just thankful he'd used ML77 launchers before.

Elanos Haliat, the Batarian leading the raid on Elysium, juked his ship constantly side to side. The combined fire from everyone on the Human line _not_ focusing on his incoming ground forces was slowly degrading his shield integrity, but if he kept mobile it wasn't enough to slow him down.

It was a fantasy he continued to maintain right up until a 22.5 millimeter rocket-powered projectile impacted the port stabilizer that had been giving him so much trouble.

His shield held, but the full kinetic energy of the blast couldn't be perfectly diverted, resulting in the flash welded repairs failing, and the stabilizer falling apart.

Haliat watched the results of the impact, helpless in the cockpit. He had no idea why his personal slave had been so adamant that they use that particular hunk of metal from the foolish ape's museum. He hadn't cared. He let the slave do as it wanted, and then flashed twenty minutes worth of torture into the wretch's implants for working so slowly.

Only now did it occur to him that perhaps a thin steel sheet in a visually distinct color stolen from a Human museum might draw the Vermin's attention to poorly welded, but vital, repairs.

He knew he should have punished his slave longer.

Without the stabilizer, the craft was unbalanced. Incorrect airflow over the wing and, more importantly, the now incorrect balance of the craft in relation to its mass effect core, _could_ theoretically be compensated for by an experienced pilot.

Elanos Haliat was more of a slave master than an experienced pilot.

The gunship fell from the sky in an elaborate death spiral, leaving an artful path marked by smoke and vaporized eezo expelled by an overworked and unbalanced core. It hit the ground and its core fully overloaded, causing a blue/white explosion and raising a ragged cheer from the line of defenders hiding behind sections of broken building, re-purposed cargo containers, and crashed air cars.

Most of the defenders had been manning the line at the edge of the city since the battle started, and most hadn't slept in that time. With the crash of the gunship that had been harassing them on-and-off for the whole battle, their morale shot up and battle cries filled the air.

"Elysium!"

"The Wolverines!"

It started with one Batarian, Belrah Habaat. He looked at the screaming and triumphant humans that he'd been shooting for two solar days, and he thought of his mate back on Aratoht. Sure, they didn't have much, but a bed to share and a domestic slave was a hell of a lot better than an ignoble death on some primitive's world. He dropped his rifle when he thought that none of the others were looking, and just began making his way back to their shuttles.

It was only moments before the defenders began firing again, heartened by the striking lack of giant flying machines shooting at them. More Batarians were cut down by the ranks of Humans fire, and after less than a minute, more than a score of the attacking slavers dropped their weapons and retreated like Habaat.

The attacking slaver group was now entirely without a leader, and when the main front countered by Lieutenant Shepard and Harry broke, the secondary fronts across the city soon broke as well. The ground war fell apart in the defender's favor, and the few Batarian ships in orbit suddenly had dozens of shuttles to cover in addition to their own asses. Alliance reinforcements that were blocked by those same cruisers earlier found their traffic lanes cleared in a matter of minutes, and the entire slaver force found itself routed and streaming atmosphere as they retreated back across the relay.

The siege of Elysium was broken.

* * *

 **Arcturus Stream Cluster, Arcturus System, High Orbit over Themis, Arcturus station - 05.16.2183**

Donnel Udina sat back in his chair, a datapad with the report he had been looking for clutched uselessly in one hand.

"Well I didn't expect that. We recruited this Potter then?"

"For a time. You have to understand, he isn't exactly a normal recruit here. Even for other people in his position, and we pulled a few exceptional officers from the civilians that helped defend Elysium, they'd have to go through basic and officer training. We would do background checks, verify some personal history, standard security clearance interviews, the usual process."

"What was the problem, I mean I have a report here of his actions earlier on Shanxi. He has at least two incidents of extraordinary valor under fire, was he temporarily rejected?"

Anderson shook his head on the other side of the table.

"That's exactly it, his history, what there is of it in our records, is filled with this kind of thing. He was at the site of seven of the twelve largest terrorist attacks all across Earth from 2020 until the founding of the Systems Alliance. The man has no identification, no education record, no jobs, or even any tax records, _despite_ working directly for the government at several different points. The only places the name Harry Potter crops up are at the sites of disasters, and in the context of a civilian that was far and away more competent than the local authorities. Udina, in the most literal sense the only paperwork we have associated with this man, and this is after a review by Inland Revenue and the Alliance Internal Defense, is a birth certificate stating that he's older than any human has any right to be, and some historical records and news clips showing he's saved hundreds of lives."

Donnel scrubbed his face, sighed, and looked down at the datapad.

"That was when we gave him this commission then? The commission that lead to Akuze?"

"Yes, and that was what led to the end of our direct interactions, anyway."


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

* * *

 **Arcturus Stream Cluster, Arcturus System, High Orbit over Themis, Arcturus station - 05.16.2183**

"The end of our interactions?"

"Donnel, we're in a corner here or I wouldn't be suggesting this. Harry Potter and the Alliance aren't on good terms. From some of his comments recorded by other marines and discovered by intelligence after the fact, that may not be entirely our fault, either. He has a lot of poorly repressed anger for some governing body called the ICW, which was likely compounded by his service with us, and there were definitely some... unkind words... exchanged after Akuze."

"Anderson, we work for a multi-system, multi-quadrillion credit government. Unkind words?"

The military man leaned as far back in his chair as he could and suppressed the urge to face palm.

"You don't recall _anything_ after Akuze that might be politely described as unkind words?"

"NO."

David Anderson gave up, and did face palm.

"Yes. Even this long after the fact, we still have no idea how it happened. You of all people know how much we spend on cyber-security."

Humanity's ambassador to the stars, Donnel Udina, leaned forward in his chair and very nearly shouted, "Harry Potter was the one who replaced every alliance extranet site with alternating frames of kitten pictures and screen grabs from HARDCORE ELCOR-HANAR FORNAX VIDS?"

Anderson was hard pressed to both nod and maintain the dignity of his bearing in the meeting.

"And you want this man to be our proposal for the specters? This man? Anderson, are you insane?"

Anderson's voice was filled with hesitation.

"No one can argue with his military record..?"

"No!"

"Okay Udina, listen to me for a second here. We have no one who has all the requisite skills. A few are close, but look at what Potter offers: our after-action report from Akuze shows he essentially killed a thresher maw with a sword, his... prank... on us shows that he either has contacts or personally can hack his way through the Alliance public firewalls, and what he did with General William's command codes on Shanxi shows he can command effectively in space."

"Do you have any idea how many problems it caused when all of our extranet contacts received PORNOGRAPHY on contact with us? He set everyone's mail contacts to auto-reply Fornax 'Best-Of' vids! In the weeks following that event our standard recruitment rates dove by 44% from the public outcry!"

"Now wait a minute, after that dive they rose to above their previous mark, and stayed there for a year because the extranet decided the Alliance had a sense of humor, I've seen those figures."

Donnel crossed his arms and looked out the window behind him, in a small voice he said "Councilor Sparatus still calls me the ambassador of the extranet in closed sessions..."

A lifetime of rigorous military training was all that stood between Anderson and laughter, and it still nearly wasn't enough. His self control, honed over a hundred deployments across thirty worlds, kept him from laughing outright. He had also been paying attention during his own Basic Training, many years ago, when his DI had yelled and yelled about superior positioning. Sitting one seat down and across the table from Udina meant his massive smile wasn't captured in the reflections Udina could see as he melodramatically stared into space.

"Okay. So no one can argue with his record. And I can see why we didn't just throw him into some penal colony in the Traverse. What makes you think he would even consent to this?"

Anderson schooled his expression immediately as Udina turned back around.

"That is actually the thing I am most certain of. If there are two facts about this man that his psyche profile shows, it's that he wants to help people, and he wants to keep out of the public eye. The Special Tactics and Reconnaissance section of the Citadel automatically covers any and all Spectre interactions under the umbrella of galactic security, and he gets legal carte-blanche to address any perceived legal or moral inadequacy across all of Council space. The Citadel Council will protect his personal security, and he can do whatever he wants to help people. If we sell it to him like that, we win."

"We win a man that appears to be a literal loose cannon."

"You're missing part two of this idea, namely that at no point in time do we ever leave him alone to make any decisions in a vacuum. We assign him a minder, and we keep a team monitoring his transponder constantly."

Anderson looked through the datapads scattered between them on the conference table until he found one and passed its info to Udina.

"Our top two were Shepard, N7, and that K7, Brower. Shepard would be perfect if she had more experience, so unless you want Brower more, we can take her along with and make her the connection back to the alliance."

Udina looked back through the Potter files and the service record for Jane Shepard. His head bobbed left and right slightly as he thought, weighing the options.

Anderson knew how repellent this idea was to Udina personally, Sparatus was an ass after all and Anderson would have already shot him if he had to work with him day-to-day, but Udina was good enough to see why this was a good idea.

Potter's data showed that he would either bring down the Alliance or he would single handedly get them a spot on the council, and given the literally thousands of lives they could trace to having been saved by him, Anderson knew where he would put his money.

It helped that he had met Potter once, back when he rejected his commission and before the extranet incident.

* * *

 **Voyager Cluster, Ganges System, Akuze, Outskirts of Unnamed Capitol Settlement - 08.21.2177**

David Anderson looked over the shoulder of the Kodiak's pilot. Technically speaking, Alliance regulations held that any and all passengers should be secured in the cargo compartment, while the pilot's section should be sealed shut, but Anderson had never been big on following all of the regs. Looking over the pilot's shoulder gave one visual access to the sensor suite of the shuttle and the ability to make better on-the-spot judgments, or so he told himself. Whether or not he had complete faith in his pilot was another thing.

In this case he was glad he made it his practice, if only to save the pilot from having to radio the scene to him. He had a feeling this retrieval would be bad. Confirmation of his suspicions had never been less satisfying.

On the edge of the city some kind of massive... well... sandworm looking thing was laying half out of the clay, and laid out in neat rows near the sandworm were a lot of bodies. The scene was terribly still, a dead town next to dead soldiers next to a dead monster. The only visible movement was a windsock at the top of the town comm tower, and the flapping of a busted up rapid deployment tent near the bodies.

They had lost contact with the colonials, but in a strange turn of events they had lost contact in the middle of their quarterly report to the Systems Alliance. Akuze was both small, and on good terms with Earth and the Alliance, so there was no reasonable explanation for the communications to just cut. They were still getting aid after all.

The marines had naturally been sent in to investigate. Two days later, with their investigatory party overdue for communications, a tech took a second look at the records of the dropped intergalactic call. Far from being just some shitty service company just having spotty reception, the encrypted handshake protocol to establish the comm channel had been rough, with several missteps where the codes had come through wrong. No one had thought anything of it at the time. When the communication techs examined the signals they _did_ receive, they realized the signal difficulty was because the other end on Akuze didn't have the other half of the Alliance handshake protocol.

It had been hard to establish because the other end had been a VI tasked with maintaining the link until whoever was running it could break down what they were being sent.

And now it looked like they were too late.

With a gesture and a shared HUD marker Anderson indicated where they should be setting down, and he left the pilot's compartment.

His men in the transport section all looked... grim. They knew the score, he did his briefings thoroughly after all. On top of that, they were all very well trained and they took their lead from him, and he looked… grim.

The shuttle jolted slightly as it set down, all of the men in the transport bay absorbing the impact in their knees and immediately hopping out. They were a well-trained bunch, and Anderson had to take a moment to appreciate the coordination of the deployment.

The men spread out, automatically covering all the angles and spreading out artfully to ensure clean fields of fire. Anderson appreciated their diligence, but what he saw with his own eyes was a bit different than what the sensors reported. In the barely held together husk of the command tent there was clearly a man sitting in what looked like a top of the line La-Z Boy and attempting to assemble a ground-to-buoy comm system by hand.

As his men continued to spread out and clear the area, one peeled off to follow him as he approached the man sheltered in the mutilated remains of the tent.

He looked dirty, and more than a little beat up. His armor had a massive slash across the chest, going straight through the plate and down to the skin-tight under layer. It looked like the blow hadn't pierced the under layer, but Anderson almost didn't want to know what happened to cut through Mark Ten Ursa armor like that. That was the best stock armor the Alliance supplied, and did not bode well for his men if anything happened.

"Soldier, report."

It was an order, but Anderson didn't have the heart to make it sound like one. The guy earned a break, he had clearly bagged and tagged thirty seven of his own men after defeating the actual monster outside.

A hand holding a flash formed screw driver idly brushed a long black hair off the man's forehead, revealing an old scar in the shape of a lightning bolt. Anderson sensed a story there, but that was probably for another time.

"Report, eh?" the man didn't bother looking up, "Look behind you, you pillock. The whole thing was a damn set-up. I'm the only survivor. I've been working on this radio for two days, I'm about to bloody finish, and you wankers show up."

The marine he had with him suppressed an aggressive frown. David suspected that only the fact that nothing in the Alliance standard codex explained the monstrosity outside kept that reaction from being more physical than facial.

"Let's start with your name, soldier."

Without missing a beat, and still mid-repair, "Potter, Harry J. Temporary Lieutenant Commander in charge of Colonial Response Force tasked with determining what happen to the human colony on the world designated Akuze. The short version, we were bloody well ambushed by that thing out there."

"And the long version, Potter, Harry J?"

The man looked up and dangerous green eyes met his own, "The long fucking version is that this whole fucking mission was some kind of fucking set up! There's nothing out there but a bunch of mint condition prefabs and bare ceramacrete! We were lured here by some dumb-ass signal and now forty nine _fucking_ people are dead! What do you think the long version is! Who in the hell even knows what happened to the colonists!"

The raw anger in the man's voice had Anderson reaching for his side arm out of instinct, he put a placating hand forward as the man finished screwing in a panel and began flash forming a set of wires with his omni-tool.

"This isn't our fault here, calm down, we're just your relief."

That had the man actually pause, "My relief!? MY RELIEF!? So you AREN'T from the cruiser that's been faffing about on the dark side of the bloody planet? How long did they take to authenticate the colony's signal, hmm? I trust a fucking politician again, and now I'm sitting on forty nine god damn graves. It's like that bombing in Rio or the damn London Olympics all over again!"

The wires he was forming met contacts that had been scoured and prepared on both side of the device he was working on, a screen lit up on a fold out section and displayed the startup screen of an operating system Anderson wasn't familiar with. Characters that looked like cuneiform ran across the screen and Potter began typing something out.

"Do you know their names?," Potter pointed to the body bags with one hand while he manipulated the holo-keyboard with the other, "Or how many fucking people were supposed to have been here? I need a god damn extranet connection, thank fuck this bloody thing is up now... Fortak better be online I know he'll know and I can send him this work up so he can..."

The man just continued rambling underneath his breath.

Anderson sighed.

This kind of thing was distressingly common in the galaxy. It was just a shame that this time it claimed a colony and the lives of forty nine marines. Fifty if the incoherent rambling of the man in front of him was anything to go by.

PTSD claimed more people...

At least this Potter character couldn't do any damage with what was probably a poorly repaired comm unit. He turned around and looked at the marine with him, "Keep an eye on him."

Walking out to the rows of bodies, he got a better look at the monster. And the damage. Anderson grabbed reference pictures from a number of angles, and in particular he grabbed as many shots as he could of the exposed acid sacs. At least he guessed it was acid. It melted through the barrel of one of his men's guns quickly enough.

He patched himself into the shuttle comm and used that as a relay to get him to the local comm buoy and galactic network. Running an image search through the standard galactic codex based on the set he took came up with a huge amount of extranet hits to domains he knew to belong to conspiracy theorists, along with a name. Translated into English: Thresher Maw. In Asari it was a lot more poetic, but that was those crazy monogenders for you.

Looking at the thing's massive scythe arms, he could kind of see it. He was also certain that vintage Asari farming equipment was absolutely terrifying

With a burst of static his comm lit up, "Commander, you should come back and see this, I don't know what this Potter guy is up to, but I'm pretty sure it breaks standard Citadel comm protocol."

Anderson swept his gaze across the field. Two of his men were confirming identities and moving the body bags, two more were taking samples off the thresher maw while the extra was still on Potter. His remaining fire team had gone off into the colony buildings.

They did good work.

With a sigh he moved back to the command tent, only to find a massive projection filling the tent and Harry explaining the detailed plot of the planet and surrounding space to his marine.

"-then you trace the signal bounce, like using the tracert command on an old earth network before Google set up the world-cloud satellite group. Of course Google eventually merged with that asteroid mining company, then the old UN split it all up under the pretense of monopoly breaking," Potter stared off into the distance for a moment and scrunched his forehead, "Merlin, I'm old."

Before Anderson could ask him to put down the computer before he hurt himself, and come with him to meet the nice men with the long-sleeve white jackets, he continued on.

"Anyway, you fire the signal off through as many locations as you can monitor, and since all spaceships are hardwired to pass along maydays you can monitor the lag times between nodes, plot them assuming a signal transit just short of the speed of light and look for a series of distances that all triangulate to the same locus, aaaand... bob's your uncle."

With a self-satisfied expression, the temporary Lieutenant Commander added a number of lines to his holo and managed to plot the location of what had to be another ship in orbit that Anderson had _not_ seen coming down. One where he had mentioned it being before, on the dark side of the planet, and squarely outside any sensor range that Anderson had access to as he entered the system and as his cruiser orbited above them.

Which wasn't something that could have happened by accident.

David hadn't followed all of Potter's rant, but if that meant what he thought it did-

"-Of course this is only step one. We have a locus, dear friends, and as useful as that is it doesn't give us anything substantial. Instead what you can do is use the trace information to find the emergency frequency of the repeater at that location. If _they_ are worth their salt, they'll rotate their frequency and cycle their emergency port numbers so you can't do what we want to do, but if _you_ are worth _yours_ then you'll have tracked the location from a few hundred points so you can run a few identification algorithms on the data you have, figure out the equation they're using to 'randomly generate' the next frequency-"

Yeah, Anderson was lost again, and the wild hand gestures and air quotes weren't helping. However, he he _was_ doing his best to figure out where this Potter guy was going conceptually, and how in the hell he had managed to make a comm machine with the specs required to do half of what he was doing.

"-and as my dear friend Fortak would say, there's the pyjack now! They, of course, deflect my attempt to crack into their systems from the hardwired emergency beacon, BUT I KNEW THEY WOULD DO THAT!" a wild look entered Harry's eyes, more madness now than when Anderson thought he was just an angry PTSD sufferer, "And because I knew it, I can use this chance to grab and analyze a section of their counter intrusion code! Now as everyone knows, counter intrusion is one of the most contentious issues in modern computing! So as it develops, different schools of thought begin to emerge," his flailing was increasing, Anderson noted, "Each of which leaves a distinct signature on how they fight you out of their system. So you take their code segment, run a few thousand simulations, and compare it to known results from previous hack attempts all of which you can find on the extranet if you know where to look, and bob's your aunt this time, we get ALLIANCE BLACK-OPS CODES!"

Anderson's omni-tool lit up as a massive amount of data began downloading to his local storage, the wrist interface activating while his arm was folded across his chest, unbalancing him as the sonic field emitters in his omni-tool forced his arms apart and forced his chest back.

Mere moments after the foreign data flooded his system, Anderson's armor comm system began blaring warnings as delayed mayday calls came from each of his men, their shuttle, every armor comm unit in the cruiser overhead, and the cruiser itself.

Potter had the grace to look bashful. At least for a moment. Then the madness and sarcasm came back in.

"Now that you know who is responsible, or at least you have all the data to figure it out when you pass it off to your analysts, I'm afraid I must insist, that you take me to your leader."

David Anderson may have been ranked N7 for most of his military career, but there wasn't a lot anyone could do in the face of twelve terabytes of hastily conjured 'proof', mayday calls from every communication system inside the entire local heliopause, and the corpse of a thresher maw.

It was understandable then, that he accidentally played into Harry's hand by asking him, in the most annoyed tone he could muster, "Why, what could you possibly have to say to my leader?"

A smile filled the other man's face, completely at odds with the rage, uncertainty, and insanity that had been there just moments before.

"What I have to say is quite simple: Fuck you and the mustache you rode in on, I quit."


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

* * *

 **Arcturus Stream Cluster, Arcturus System, High Orbit over Themis, Arcturus station - 05.16.2183**

"I don't like this. I do _not_ like that this is our best option. If Shepard or Brower's records looked even the slightest bit better, we wouldn't even be discussing this. I would even take a C rating over this Potter, and I don't need to tell you about the issues I've had with Command and Control specialists."

Udina was _trying_ to look intensely into Anderson's eyes. He was trying really hard to make his point, and he was clearly thinking about using the intensity of his eyes to do so.

It was very uncomfortable.

However David once had to look Admiral Steven Hackett in the eye and tell him that Potter had rejected his commission and requested in a jaunty tone that he 'fuck himself and the mustache he rode in on'. In comparison Udina's 'intensity' didn't even rate his top ten. That day Anderson learned a _lot_ about being stared at uncomfortably and also to never again offer a literal interpretation of a situation without the specific request of a superior officer.

"I know you're uncomfortable with this, but Potter is head and shoulders above all of our other options. Of all of Humanity's armed forces, he stands the best chance of being accepted as a Spectre on his own merit, even without any Human political concerns muddying the waters amongst the Council."

"I know that!" Udina transferred his intensity to his volume, "But look at what he's already done to Humanity's image on a galactic scale!"

"Yes, look! What do you think would have happened if he hadn't been at Shanxi? You've been briefed on the Turian's tactical position! What if Potter hadn't stolen those codes, and what if Williams had surrendered like he intended to?"

Anderson allowed a moment for his own voice to override the politician's in the conversation.

"Our species entered the galactic community from a position of strength. No one could question our determination, the Turians were the most significant military force in the galaxy and after their 'Relay 314 incident' we walked out onto the galactic scene bargaining from a position of strength that no species has enjoyed since before the Krogan Rebellion. That was his doing, and what's more he did it because he liked his neighbors and wasn't willing to be invaded over a misunderstanding."

The bad taste in Udina's mouth was visible, but like David thought, he was too good at his job to not be able to put his personal distaste away in favor of the truth. Say what you will about Humanity, but after over two thousand one hundred and fifty years of 'modern' history, we finally figured out how to appoint our political animals.

Not, like, _well_. But we got there.

"Where is he now? If he gave up his commission we don't have him on staff, so where did he end up?"

Anderson finally had information worth a genuine smile, "He already lives on Eden Prime."

Donnel Udina took himself seriously, and he took his job seriously. Humanity, his species, his genetic identity, all worthy of respect. Every moment of his life spent on the Citadel and in the halls of Jump Zero, Arcturus station, and every other Human or alien held piece of ground, he tried to live up to that ideal.

So when he slouched down in his chair across the conference table from Commander David Anderson, it was with a sense of both relief and defeat.

"At least we have that going for us."

* * *

 **Exodus Cluster, Utopia System, Eden Prime, Outskirts of Constant, Potter Estate - 06.02.2183**

Harry looked out at the stunning vista of his land, purchased specifically for the view. He had valleys, he had fields, he even had a small wood which he frequently got drunk in. Between the rustic and homey feel of the land, the refined taste of the Council manor he worked so hard on, and the sheer sci-fi bullshit of the spaceport in the distance, he loved this place.

He had paid through his merlin-be-damned nose for it too. Of course his money had originally been in galleons, which he had then converted to pounds sterling and then, somewhere in the mid-2160s, converted again to galactic standard credits through an intermediary back on Earth.

Eden prime was easily humanity's most beautiful colony world, and one of the first, so it was naturally among the most expensive. The land cost him a couple thousand credits a hectare, and he owned about sixty-five hundred.

In light of all of this, the pure spine tingling rage that he felt, the rage that curled around his heart and squeezed before being crushed under the weight of his occulmency, was utterly justified. After all, a fucking super-dreadnaught fell from the damn sky, puts massive holes in his land, droped a few hundred jumped-up washing machines which proceeded to start shooting people, and most importantly if all, _stomped all over his mother-fucking roses_.

This would not stand.

Harry paused and took a breath. Did he have the time to make coffee before dealing with whatever was happening on his god damned planet? From far-off, the sound of gunfire pierced the silencing spell that ran like a curtain around his home, and told him probably not.

Harry looked to the sky and shook his fist, "Every bloody time, you bastards? EVERY BLOODY TIME!"

It wasn't worth bothering. This made the third colony he tried to settle on that turned around on him. Maybe he should just sell his land again and buy a ship? Overriding docking protocols to board his ship just _had_ to be harder than landing a merlin-be-damned fleet on his fucking planet. It'd be different at least.

Harry sighed in disgust. A concern for later, he had more pressing business.

Turning from his porch, Harry's gaze swept across his home, where the floor was covered with bodies. Piled two deep in some places.

It was, he reflected, a wonderful mess.

Wonderful not only in the sense of the beautiful carnage that lead to this moment, but also for the fact that many of the bodies were still naked and drunk off the finest wood grain alcohols ever produced by the stills in his neighbor's shed.

Harry made it a point to keep an active academic presence on the extranet, over a century of friendship with the first person he ever saved having rubbed off on him. Naturally when a bunch of Humanity's finest Prothean experts all showed up on his planet, he naturally found his way to their dig site and got most of them to come to his place for a friendly get-together.

It was the neighborly thing to do, after all.

The get-together naturally lead to a few drinks, got a little rowdy, and attracted the notice of his neighbors. The Ayyangar clan that lived in the plot of land next to his were a bunch of serious partiers, and when Harry's humble gathering attracted their notice, a delegation had shown up on his door with the latest products from their shed. Then things got weird.

If there was one thing Harry loved about colonial worlds, it was the relaxed liquor laws.

Harry's memory of the evening sort of drifted off when one of the more comely female archaeologists decided that she needed to prove that lap dances paid her way through Oxford.

Now he stepped through a mass of ethnically Indian bodies and half-naked experts on all things Prothean to get to his closet.

He always kept a fully serviced set of Hanhe-Kedar's latest armor in his closet. He may not have liked his luck, but Harry James Potter would be damned if he wasn't prepared for it.

When he had suited up, Harry went to the kitchen and grabbed a sandwich from his icebox, and headed out. Janelle Sharber, who led the circuit analysis team for the Prothean beacon they found, was somehow already awake at the island in his kitchen. He raided his ice box again before heading out to his destiny, and as he left she gave him a very hungover wave before returning her head to her hands.

Merlin, did he love hot chicks, ones with degrees were even better. If that was how they made them back at Cornell on Earth, he may have to chance his magic in going back.

It _was_ a bit depressing that he had a century on them, but such was life.

Harry shook his head, things to do. Gunfire should really rank higher on his priority list, but ten minutes with a hot and hung-over electrical engineer was usually worth it.

* * *

 **Exodus Cluster, Utopia System, Breaking Orbit With Mass Relay, SSV Normandy - 06.02.2183**

"Bring us in fast and quiet. This just got a lot more complicated."

When Joker acknowledged, David Anderson closed the comm channel. A headache sprang up from behind his eyes, making him pinch the bridge of his nose in the pointless hope that it would go away.

The council had been shown Potter's record, and they had seemed uncharacteristically enthused. Councilor Sparatus in particular seemed caught between appreciation of the man's martial skill, and disappointment that Potter would have made terrible Turian.

With hardly any formal debate they saw fit to dispatch Nihlus Kyrik, one of the protégés of their top Spectre, Saren Arterius. David's general bad feeling about the situation had only increased upon that revelation, his fears only lightly assuaged after several standard days' worth of space travel with the man. Nihilus had turned out to be nothing like his mentor, but that was hardly enough to make Anderson forget his own history.

Once upon a time, David Anderson had been in the position he and Udina were going to put Potter in. Saren had been his evaluating agent, and by the end of the mission a building full of dock workers were dead, and more than twice that number in the surrounding neighborhoods had to deal with lethal concentrations of element zero.

Anderson did not go on to become a Spectre.

At this stage none of that was important though.

All comm traffic from Eden Prime was filled with reports of a massive invasion. Local news across the planet was showing civilian satellite feeds of the area of attack and directing people to bunkers, and the satellites themselves were each being re-tasked before their eyes to mark hostile troop positions. Helmet cams and other video data from the local net and garrison confirmed it from the ground.

The real concern however, was the gravimetric data coming from the precise location the Normandy had been heading towards.

Gravity being a function of mass, and playing with mass being a function of most modern technology, it was unsurprising that the readings they were getting weren't accounted for by the normal terrain features of the planet below the. What _was_ surprising however was just how goddamn _big_ the mass effect field they were reading was, covering a mass that was greater than Humanity's largest artificial structures.

From where he stood on the bridge Anderson could see many of the reports flooding in from across the region surrounding the capitol of Constant, they were catching more detailed alerts from military channels, civilian broadcasts, and as they closed with the planet even individual omni-tool alerts from citizens trapped in firefights and destroyed buildings. The information kept flowing in, allowing them to refine their picture of what they were flying toward, until they saw a massive shift in the mass-effect signature standing astride the city. In an instant every channel they could access became howling static, jamming covered the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Anderson and Nihlus shared a look, before returning to scanning reports the analysts were flagging for their attention. Joker made best time for the surface.

The flanged voice of the only Turian on board cut through the quiet chatter on the bridge, "How will we find this Potter? Picking up your people's beacon is priority, but with the colony in such disarray what is the plan?"

Anderson pulled up the Alliance tax and census records he had been given access to, and overlaid the data on the surface images the Normandy had taken since passing through the relay.

"Records show that Potter bought a big chunk of land on the outskirts of the capitol here," he said dropping a waypoint, "Whatever is causing the interference in the reports we're getting from the planet is coming from… here." he said, highlighting another region between the city and Harry's land.

Anderson turned to meet the Turians eye, "If the situation planet-side is as bad as it looks on sensors, I lay odds on Potter already being in whatever op-area we drop into, before we get there. He… has a history for this kind of thing."

* * *

 **Exodus Cluster, Utopia System, Eden Prime, Outskirts of Planetary Capitol of Constant - 06.02.2183**

Harry really wished for two things.

First, he wished that he had made contact with the local garrison when he bought his land, formal discharge or no. It was far too late to make a proper introduction now, something told him showing up in the barracks with a keg and a notice-me-not wouldn't go down well, what with there being a war on and everything. Using codes he _really_ had no right to possess, Harry tied himself into in on the local tac-net, taking pains to suppress any indication of his presence.

Hey! General Billy Surrender-kins' grand-daughter was a local! Talking to (read: harassing) the Williams family was a rich and nuanced past time of his.

Ah, more missed opportunities.

Second, he desperately wished he had been kinder to the hundreds of small appliances he had destroyed over the years. He couldn't help but think that whatever the hell these attacking synthetics were, they were probably the universe's overdue karmic retribution for the dozens of computers he destroyed by accident, and the few hundred toasters he had fried 'by accident', before he worked out the whole technology/magic thing back in 2108. That was to say nothing of the untold number of alarm clocks that had received _reductos_ for the innocent execution of their normal duty. Or when he accidentally cut down that cell tower disguised as a tree, fora very memorable drunken Christmas.

The Kent County Council had never forgiven him (those that knew anyway) and it now appeared that the cosmos had not either. Harry now really wished he had not incurred that kind of bad juju, as this was surely not going to end well. He had enough trouble on his own anyway, why did he constantly do these things that come back to him later?

As he left his place, Harry raised a few good old-fashioned war-wards around his home, and apparated nearer the tentacle-monster-dreadnaught. He needed to find how and where the locals were being evacuated in order to assist, but more importantly he desperately needed to claim he had seen enough hentai to know where this was going and his wit was worthless without an audience.

The massive ship seemed content, for the moment, with dropping off more flashlight heads near the spaceport. That was fine by Harry because the moment it decided to provide orbital-grade fire support from air-car range, the colony was in real trouble.

In the absence of proper intel, Harry decided to do things the old fashioned way. So he crouched and popped around the limits of his visual range, apparating from cover to cover until he heard the first hints of close explosions or gunfire. There was a constant low level of sporadic fire across the city, but until he found a firefight or an _actual_ authority figure, he was on his own.

The beacon thing, which probably should have been a secret but was definitely not, was the only object of any special value on the planet. Unless of course you really liked fourth reformation Methodists, which hey, who was he to judge. Outside of that specific scenario however, the robots and dreadnaught were here for the Prothean beacon. Eden Prime had nothing a murderous spaceship and it's equally murderous inhabitants would find interesting, and couldn't get cheaper somewhere else.

So Harry made generally for the dig site, since that was where someone who wanted it would probably go first. Between strip poker rounds two and three last night, one of the scientists had gotten chatty, so Harry knew the beacon had been moved to the spaceport for pickup. Murder-bots from beyond the stars would probably check the dig site first though.

Harry was halfway there before he found an Alliance patrol, and trouble.

A platoon appeared in the tac-net near him, making his omni-tool beep and his ears perk up a bit. Legal authority for violence was always welcome, particularly when the enemy had gone through all the trouble of bringing violence to you. Finding the person in charge and sweet talking his way into getting deputized had saved him from more after-action inquests than was reasonable, even by his standards.

On the patrol's side it had been a nightmare from hell to breakfast. While Harry had woken, scratched, dealt with the oncoming sense of doom, and dressed himself unhurriedly for the day, they had been woken by blaring alarms as colony-vital extranet connections closed, and the passive sensors parked in the planet's LaGrange points were destroyed. Planet-side defensive installations were blown away by overwhelming firepower from orbit, and they had spent most of their morning defending starport vital areas, before getting new orders sending them on a patrol around the city limits. They were then immediately separated from their assigned route by a super-dreadnaught class starship coming down from the sky to stride across the battlefield like an angry god.

To his credit, Harry wasn't blind to their plight. Having been shot a few times in his day, he was careful to snap a number of twigs he had picked up for that exact purpose and kick a few stones he saw lying around. Approaching a bunch of stressed and trigger happy marines in the middle of a patrol was a risky prospect at the best of times, but doing do unannounced and without prior warning was a great way to break his streak.

Having heard his signs, the marines stopped and took a defensive posture. They had been following the bottom of a low valley that ran east-west, taking cover as they could between the odd rock formation and the sparse vegetation. The ridges on either side of them protected them from hostile vision at range, but restricted their own ability to ID incoming threats. Harry approached from the top of the southern-most ridge, he made sure to tuck his wand into his gauntlet, and place his pistol visibly on the magnetic holster at his thigh. Cresting the ridge with hands up and in the open, Harry let his outline mark him, stark against the blue sky behind him.

He was a smart man, relatively anyway, and giving the marines every advantage they could get on him was probably a good plan if he wanted to peacefully make contact in a war zone. Of course no plan survives contact with the enemy.

The marine platoon consisted of five three-man fire teams, one of which he could immediately tell was tasked with casualty duty. They had two grunts on makeshift stretchers in the middle of their formation. He was met with the more deadly end of seven rifles and a shouted, "Identify!"

Later, Harry would kick himself for his response.

"Hey, are you Ashley Williams? OH SHIT WHATS THAT!?"

Harry's brilliant approach, designed from the ground up to not get him shot, had been replicated by a group of walking toasters on the other side of the valley with a minor twist. As it happened they had not chosen to break twigs and kick rocks, also they weren't looking for the whole 'peaceful' thing either.

Harry could see visible disgust and confusion through the marine's visors at the age old tactic, that he would dare attempt it in front of a group of Systems Alliance Marines in the year 2183... But he could also see five murder-bots, one of which was red, tall, and seemed to have an antenna coming out of its back.

In a flash he had his wand in one hand and his pistol in the other, and in a series of flashes the marines started pouring fire into his position, tearing up the top of the ridge. Harry threw himself into cover behind the low rise, his kinetic barrier lit up like a pyjack at a Krogan bar mitzvah, and in the same moment the flashlights on the other side of the valley began firing down into it.

With a twist Harry flung himself through space, aiming for the north side of the valley, but about ten meters further out from the mechs. He appeared on target, and his prayers were answered in that the flashlights hadn't been hiding a hundred more bots behind the ridge.

Just three.

Two marines fell immediately. One of soldiers on casualty duty fell dead, directly on top of the man he had been guarding. His cut-off shout brought the rest of the marines around, the weight of their fire shifting from Harry's former position to the robots.

Harry didn't bother with cover, the marines hardly had any which inspired the part of him that valued fairness to temporarily overrule the part of him that valued not getting shot. Aiming carefully he called out, " _Kontakte Lyn!"_ firing off a bolt of lightning into the group of machines, specifically at the big fella.

The electricity actually caught the edge of the antenna on its right shoulder, burning straight through whatever it was made of and causing its chest to explode outward and catch fire. Like one might expect from an organic, the machine's three fingered hand tightened in a death spasm, causing it to fire its massive rifle wildly into the ground and into the unit immediately to its right.

The high caliber fire from the rifle carved through the second machine's barrier, but not much else. Harry was never one to let an advantage go, and finished the dead flashlight's work with a few well-placed shots.

The whole sequence of events took place over less than five seconds, not a lot of time by almost any definition, but enough for the marines to work out the whole the situation out and properly rally. Harry pulled the machines' attention by taking out the big one, so when the 11 rifles of the surviving patrol began barking out for attention they took the remaining three robots at the tip of the ridge out, almost immediately.

While they shot up the three they could see, Harry had the three back-ups that hadn't crested the ridge to deal with. Their collected fire brought his barrier down and made him cast a shield in front of himself. Hyper accelerated metal pellets crashed against a glowing silver dome, each shot beating against it shield like drum, filling the air with reverberating bangs.

Harry concentrated on holding the shield and, breaking his own rules about teleporting while in an active battlefield, threw himself through space with another twist to a point behind the units firing on him. He arrived in one piece, with each of the robots still firing on his old position.

Harry spent a second refining his aim, then cast three quick _piccorudere_ s with the wand in his left hand. The static of the charm overwhelmed each of their barriers in an instant, allowing the Brawler Mk. VIII in his right hand to shred each of the their chest cavities.

Harry used his omni-tool to send a ping through his surroundings as soon as the last one fell. The lack of incoming gunfire was a solid indicator, but he'd been hurt by enemies playing dead or waiting for him to drop his guard before. His hardware didn't pick up any kind of return, other than the marines anyway, so he figured he was okay. Except for those marines.

If his motion tracker was any indication, they left a fire team with the casualties and the remaining eight were at the edge of the ridge, about to crest it from their side. He had a feeling they might even already have eyes on him, so with exaggerated care he slapped his Brawler to his thigh and put his wand back into his gauntlet.

The wand thing was probably going to raise some questions, but if he was lucky they'd wait till everyone was out of danger. Then they crested the ridge and pointed their guns at him again.

"Hands up!"

Harry quickly complied.

"You a biotic?"

Two marines closed on him while the rest covered, full helmets deployed. It sounded like they voted Ashley the spokeswoman.

Harry grinned.

"Something like that."

One of the two took his pistol while the other stood behind him, gun drawn, he guessed.

"You with these things?"

Harry shook his head, "Would I have killed this bunch of jumped-up pocket watches if I was?"

A lady in the back snickered at 'pocket-watches', which may have been a mistake given that encouraging Harry rarely went to a good place. Sensing a distinct lack of conflict, four marines peeled off and went back to the downed men on the other side of the ridge.

The spokeswoman waved off the rest of the group, grabbing his pistol from the man who had confiscated it as he passed, and motioned for Harry to drop his hands. With a practiced eye, she ejected his thermal magazine and his ammo block, checking both for illegal mods probably. When her cursory search revealed nothing, she put both pieces back into the gun and handed it back to Harry.

"You know me?"

"I know your grandfather. Wiley old bastard, but Billy is a good man."

Harry could just barely see her eyes narrow behind her helmet visor.

"Only one person calls granddad 'Billy'."

Harry's smile stretched across his face, and spreading his arms he proclaimed, "Harry James Potter in the flesh! Though Billy still calls me 'That Bastard' I think."

First Sergeant Ashley Williams put her hands on her hips and frowned forcefully at the armored man in front of her. She was wearing a helmet, so she was experiencing a bit of a gravitas shortfall, but Harry could tell.

"Granddad was the one who convinced me to take this posting. He said something about 'catching up with that bastard' when he saw me off."

If it was possible, Harry's smile widened even further, "Like I said, Billy is a good man."

/-/

From the valley to the spaceport, Harry made good time with the marines. Grouping up with them was the smart thing to do, even setting aside how they were going to be shielding him from having to deal with any of those pesky lawyer-types for all the property damage he was sure he'd be 'wrongfully' accused of. Also he couldn't live with himself if he let something bad happen to Billy's grand-daughter.

Their progress would have been slower without Harry's omni-tool scans. Using them as an early warning system, the group managed to evade two other small ambushes and totally reverse a third.

Inside half of an hour they made it to the port, and secured the beacon along with the shuttle pad.

The weird squid-dreadnaught was still on station just outside the city, for whatever reason, and was continuing to jam everything above mid-range comms. They didn't have any pressing casualties, the injured marines being stable, and as harsh as the sentiment was, the dead marines were couldn't get more dead. Without orders above the regular patrol they were assigned, and without comms above about a klick or so, the decision was made to bunker down and await either back up or some kind of window in the ECM jamming.

Before anyone got any bright ideas, Harry warned all of the marines off touching the neat glowing beacon thing. Prothean beacons were few and far between, but they still had a history of trapping people in mass effect fields and giving them nightmares. Hell, this was the most intact specimen that had ever been found, and the delightful electrical engineer with a doctoral thesis on recovered Prothean technology (who was probably still hungover in his kitchen) had no idea what many of the thing's circuits were supposed to do.

He was tempted to just throw it into one of the boxes scattered around the pad, but he didn't want to get close enough to do even that.

/-/

Things were going well.

Well...

Well enough for a day that started with a hangover and then moved directly into an invasion from a bunch of walking vacuum cleaners with delusions of grandeur. Or Geth apparently. Harry'd heard of them but never seen them, and Miss Williams had better intel than he did, evidently.

So things were going well.

Right up until one of the fucking marines, an honest to god red-shirt with full helmet, no name-tag, and no identifying marks of any kind, that son of a bitch, went and said, "I'm bored."

Harry winced visibly.

In another lifetime a man named Neville Longbottom had used those words, and shortly there-after the building they were in exploded, causing the pair to lose the criminal they were pursuing. The resulting fires cost each of them their hair. They vowed to never go on a stake-out near an unlicensed apothecary again.

A man named Ronald Weasley once said those words; they had been on an extended family vacation in Romania, fishing of all things. A flight of dragons literally fell from the sky above them, capsizing their boat and leaving them stranded in the middle of a lake. They would go on to perform a blood oath, swearing to never utter those words again. They would also go on to swear a less binding oath to never go fishing in Romania again.

A woman named Hermione Granger did not believe him when he claimed those words were cursed. In a manner that was just so very... _her_... she used that exact pair of words in a test to determine empirically if they were 'cursed'.

The section of the Hogwarts' library that they were in at the time burned to the ground. The spark that started the fire came from a tiny first year student, just eleven years old, who later claimed to be distracted when the big fluffy cat he was looking at turned out to be a woman's hair. Hermione's hair, as it happened.

Harry was not _fond_ of those words.

On cue, a vibration picked up in the floor plating of the pad. It rose steadily as Harry stewed, attracting everyone's notice from the speaker of those awful words to the lovely Miss Williams, who to her credit looked askance on the bastard red shirt. Then the platoon's tac-net started screaming.

"We've got a monorail inbound here, one Turian, three of those big red ones, and twelve of the normal ones on it. They have a lot of cargo. Range twenty-two hundred meters."

Harry sighed, scrubbed at his face, and walked over to the nameless red shirt (blue armor?) jackass. As he approached he striped the gauntlet from his right hand, the seals unlatching with loud sucking sounds. When his skin was free, the other marines saw the determination in his steps and quickly moved to the side, leaving a corridor through the crowd to the unfortunate one.

When he was within five feet, Harry cupped his hand over his mouth and blew gently into it, casting a spark into his palm. The spark flickered and grew until flames poured over every exposed inch of the skin on his hand. The marines all stared dumbfounded.

Lighting and teleportation were each one thing. They'd be a bitch to explain, but for a person who'd seen FTL transit and an Alliance-standard overload grenade, their disbelief could be suspended. Fire crawling around bare skin though, being lit from a man's breath?

Droplets of fire fell from his outstretched hand, marring the surface of the deck plate with small sooty lines. When he reached the marine, he took his flaming hand, and smacked the armored man upside the back of his head.

It came from Harry's lips in an enraged hiss, "Do not _ever_ say those words!"

If a fully helmeted face could look betrayed, the marine's did, "All I did was say I was bored!"

Harry smacked the marine upside the head again, harder.

"Listen here you two bit git: Never. Say. Those. Words," Harry pointed to his omni-tool, which still showed the reports of the local tactical net. As if by magic, one of the marines on overwatch covering the monorail line called in.

"We ID'd the cargo on the line, there's warning labels all over the boxes, it's explosives. There's enough to level most of the city, looks like."

Harry called back to the overwatch without breaking eye contact with the red-shirt, "I need an identification on those explosives, are they chemical or fusion?"

Harry glared down at the marine, disgust written plain across his face. The poor bastard whose helmet now wore two separate sooty hand prints cowered.

"I swear to god, if you say it again, I will personally show you a fate worse than death-"

"NO!"

"YES! You'll be testing new field ration flavors for the rest of your career, on the moon! We're talking banana-carob, meatloaf surprise, and vegan-cheese and crackers from now until you qualify for a pension. I know an ex-general, I'll do it, I'm crazy!"

The platoon visibly recoiled in horror. Setting one's self on fire was one thing, but there were few things an Alliance marine feared worse than Alliance standard field rations.

With wild eyes, Harry clutched his flaming hand to his chest, and stalked past the few marines still standing around, making his way to the front. The overwatch crew stood on a bridge crossing over the monorail line, above the tram loading zone. The three marines were taking cover behind boxes and each marking the steady advance of fifteen Geth, a Turian, and explosives enough to make a good sized dent in a small moon.

Noting the double chevrons on the neck collar of the armor nearest him Harry called out, "Corporal, you got an ID on those explosives yet?"

"No, uh, Sir. No ID yet. I'd guess chemical based on the hazard label, but they're still just short of a klick out, so it's right hard to tell for sure."

The marine spared a glance from his scope, and shot a gimlet eye at the fist engulfed in flames, and the lack of clear military insignia. Turning back to his rifle he said, "If you don't mind my asking sir, but are you alright there? What with the flame and all."

Harry looked down at his fist in surprise for a moment, and as if he had never seen it before and was astounded on having made such a discovery, "Well would you look at that!"

He stared at his hand for a moment, turning it about to catch it from every angle. The esteemed corporal couldn't help but roll his eyes from behind the visor of his helmet, the antics of the insane civvie nearly distracting him from his target.

Beneath them the rails of the tram-line began audibly vibrating, signaling the presence of an oncoming tram bearing a big load of 'you're not going to have a good day'.

"No corporal, I think I'm fine."

The marine huffed a bit, "Good to know. Do you have a rank, uh, sir?"

"Not at the moment, but for what it's worth I was a staff commander for a while."

The marine fiddled with his sight, marking distance and updating the tac-net, "Always thought you officer types were a bit daft."

Harry pulled his wand from its sheath in his gauntlet, and ran the tip across his exposed wrist, cutting his veins wide open. The blood pooled unnaturally around his wrist, and where it touched, the fire surrounding his hand got hotter.

In an unconcerned tone, he responded, "Corporal, you have no bloody idea."

As the monorail got to within three hundred meters, the Turian gestured in the direction of the marines, and the robots opened fire. Tall, dark, and scaly had guessed, rightly, that a platoon of marines would both understand the markings on the crates he was taking cover behind, and not be too keen on firing at them.

At one hundred fifty meters Harry began a quiet chant, low and deep, his words were easily covered by the gunfire. The corporal he had been bothering earlier turned to get a look, and was troubled by what he saw.

Using his wand as a crude brush Harry had drawn what looked, to the corporal's inexpert eye, like a bad pentagram using his own blood. Where the bottom two spokes of the star should have ended, they instead went on to form a few different arrows all generally pointed towards the oncoming tram. Harry kept his chant up, but engaged his omni-tool and began staring at the tactical readout.

When the distance from the dock to the lead rail car fell to eighty meters, the big red Geth started firing the significantly larger rifles they held, pounding down on the marine positions with energy pulses like siege weapons. The fire team that had been holding the far side of the bridge had fallen back behind Harry, staring at the blatant pagan/voodoo nonsense as they passed, to landing pad beyond. Under First Sergeant Williams' watchful eye, they began setting up a more detailed defensive position there using cargo crates.

At twenty meters to dock, most of the cover on the bridge had been destroyed, and two of the three marines that had been on overwatch retreated to Williams' second position. The rifle fire from the larger Geth was brutal in its efficiency, simultaneously chewing up and grinding down the hardened plas-steel of the standard cargo containers with some kind of direct-energy charge.

Harry hung back on the bridge, still chanting, and being guarded by that single corporal who really hoped he knew what he was doing. At fifteen meters, the corporal's faith finally proved to not be misplaced.

With a firm declaration of " _Fiendfyre_ ," the flames that had been flowing around Harry's wrist and hand followed the flow of his blood down to the circle he prepared, and from there, shot forward to the tune of the screams of the damned. The cargo container they had taken cover behind was reduced to white hot slag in an instant, the energy and bullets fired in their direction fared no better against the torrent of fire. It swept down from the bridge like a physical wave, flowing between the boxes of high-explosives leaving them as islands in a flood of unholy flames.

The Geth's kinetic barriers held secure against the conflagration for whole seconds before they went the way of the cargo box before them. The Turian's shields too held for but a moment, before he joined his synthetic brethren in a quick burning death.

The rush of fire caused air to whip through the canyon formed by the tram loading zone and the landing pad next to it. The compression and movement of the wind made it whistle high and loud, masking the final burst transmissions of the Geth and the death screams of a mind controlled bird-man from outer space.

When his enemies were dead, utterly and completely destroyed, by fire hotter than the heart of a neutron star (yet inexplicably cool enough to not set off three tonnes of explosives), Harry began visibly struggling and sweating. Slowly, at a fraction of a fraction of its previous pace, the flow of the fire reversed. It slowly curled round the explosives, and with visible reluctance made its way back up to the bridge. Licks of fire flicked off the main flow, caressing the walls of the artificial valley and nipping at the ceramacrete walls, leaving melted pools of metal and black glassy walls behind. Each touch of fire seemed to drive the temperature up, but still the flames slowly reversed to the circle they sprang from.

It condensed, flowing into and around itself as it fell back into the circle, and when all was contained the blood forming the circle became ash, and the fire returned to Harry's hand. It lay white hot, so bright it hurt to look directly at it, in a blob in his hand the size of a grenade. Had it obeyed the laws of God and conventional physics it would have been emitting the same radiation commonly put out by stars.

When it was condensed in his hand, color and vitality returned to Harry's countenance, he began to smile, "Cool, huh?"

The corporal, who had stayed by his side thinking he was giving up his life guarding an idiotic civvie, despite said civvie's earlier competence, was dumbfounded. He wasn't a scientist, the intersection of scientist and marine was rather rare indeed, but he knew a bit about physics and fire and how things normally should work. What he had just seen violated everything he knew about the universe he lived in.

And now that crazy civvie was tossing the fire-thing from hand to hand like it was a hot potato.

"Now I've never learned to juggle these things, mostly because I've never had the balls to do this twice in a row, because seriously, do you have any idea how crazily, insanely dangerous this i-"

Then he dropped it.

Harry looked with wide eyes and a white complexion from where the ball of fire fell, to the marine next to him, back to the ball. In a flash he noted that at least the corporal already looked ready to bolt.

"Shit. Run."

And so they ran.

Sprinting full out they made it to the barriers that Ashley Williams set up, vaulting them and making for cover as fast as they could. Sergeant Williams made to stand and ask them just what in the hell happened on the monorail, when Harry jumped on top of her, forcing her to the ground. He looked up at the crowd of marines staring at him like he was a madman, and shouted, "Cover!"

On the other side of the wall, the monorail dock and the monorail itself went up in a pillar of fire that actually touched the edge of the planet's atmosphere. There was no debris or fallout, just a nanosecond's worth of the thermal output of your average neutron star added directly into the atmosphere of the planet, an act which would completely throw off the natural weather patterns of Eden Prime for well over a year.

/-/

In orbit over the planet, the sensors of the SSV Normandy registered a moment of _extreme_ thermal output from the planet below. The readings were so out of place, so anomalous, that the VIs managing data collection in the Normandy's sensors classified it as a short in the physical circuitry of the sensors.

Then, of course, the sweet delicious thermal energy in the atmosphere didn't just disappear.

The VIs recalibrated, and ran the information across the tech's screen, and then ran additional recalibrations. The expected effects, rushing high atmosphere wind, the flash creation of smog components, and the burning of a small hole in the ozone, all played out like they should have. In less than a minute the sensor tech and the VI agreed that _some_ kind of massive explosion took place, and they forwarded the information to the captain.

Captain of the SSV Normandy, David Anderson, looked at the data sent to him from his techs along with a wealth of information which had just cleared the ECM blanketing the city.

He looked at the data, and he slammed his fist onto the console, and he cursed,

"God dammit Potter."

* * *

[A/N]: It's probably worth noting that when I post one of these, you guys should give it like 8 or so hours before you read. By the time it hits the net I've read and corrected the chapter through twice, but I re-read again when it's in a different format as-posted, and correct it again when I find new things. It's not a big deal, but I'd say this chapter is already ~200 words different from when it was initially posted.

This is inconvenient to you, and I apologize for that. It is also unlikely to change.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5**

* * *

 **Exodus Cluster, Utopia System, Eden Prime, Cargo Shuttle Pad at the Outskirts of Planetary Capitol - 06.02.2183**

Harry groaned.

He _hated_ when that happened.

Last time he dropped a ball of _fiendfyre,_ he got his fourth official censor by the International Confederation of Wizards. Never you mind that his spell closed the Death Gate the revived Knights of Walpurgis had just opened at the Tunguska impact site, no, it _never_ counted when he saved the world and accidently set off global warming.

Okay, so that was the third time he had done it, but still!

Harry sighed and shifted some of the rather melted plas-steel container off of himself. It wasn't like he didn't understand their point, he was single handedly responsible for what a growing number of non-magical types started referring to as 'global climate change' and 'a hole in the ozone layer', but some credit would have been nice. Instead it was all, 'you bastard', and 'It's all your fault', and 'OHMYGOD WHAT HAVE YOU DONE HAVE YOU EVEN CONSIDERED THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR ACTIONS JESUS CHRIST YOU KNOW YOU CAN'T JUGGLE'.

Speaking of which, "Ashley?"

From the pile of armor beneath him came, "That Bastard?"

Harry moved off her, and laid back down with a sigh.

Uncanny. Her voice hit him right in the nostalgia. For a moment all he could see was the iron grey Moscow sky, and the disappointed face of Vladimir Putin, then head of both the magical and muggle governments.

A reverberating sound filled the air, so deep Harry could feel it in his chest, and the weird squid-dreadnaught took to the air. Static charge lanced off the edges of its mass effect field as it rose, forming bolts of lightning that slammed into towers across the city.

From where he lay, Harry watched it rise and disappear into space.

Yeah.

That seemed right.

Harry groaned again, and shifting a few times, managed to pull the sandwich he had stored in his pocket. Gingerly, he un-wrapped the wax paper, and revealed his glorious turkey on sourdough. With a bite, he settled in, pulling the plas-steel back over him and wiggling to find a comfortable spot.

This day was only going to get worse.

/-/

The sight Lieutenant Commander Jane Shepard walked into wasn't what she expected, but given that the sensor readings from orbit indicated either a nuclear detonation or the presence of a small sun, it wasn't that big of a deal. She preferred it this way, really.

The local tac-net reported that her targets, and a marine patrol platoon, were in front of her. From where she was standing, it wasn't clear that was actually the case. What she actually _saw_ was a mess of containers and cargo melted like someone put tupper-ware into an oven. In some cases things had melted over the marines that had been taking cover behind them, which, you know, what the hell...

Potter seemed to be alright, Jane vividly recalled how god damn annoying he was so in her opinion that was a bit of a wash, but the beacon seemed mostly intact and the marines seemed the same.

Two marines were trying to separate a washing machine from the back of a third, where it had melted and stuck itself between armor plates. Another was attempting to pull his legs out of a cargo container/deck plate sandwich.

It didn't make a lot of sense, but Jane had seen Harry Potter's brand of casual insanity and violation of the laws of physics before, so she chose to write it off and move on.

Shepard had taken Kaidan Alenko and Richard 'Leeroy' Jenkins with her as her away team, but evidently neither shared her acquired taste for the weird. Beneath Kaiden's breath she clearly heard, "What the shit..."

Jenkins went to the man trying to get his legs free, setting a combat knife and the butt of his rifle to the situation. Alenko applied his biotics to the dishwasher-attached-to-back issue. Jane went right for their secondary objective.

Their secondary objective looked like he was snoring.

"Potter? Harry Potter"

The man flinched and pushed the shining plas-steel that had formed in his shape off himself, "I'm awake, I'm awake! Just resting my eyes for a minute Williams, Christ."

Jane looked down at the man who looked exactly as tired and as crazy as she remembered. His eyes still had that madness in their emerald depths, and he had crumbs all over his face. She remembered Elysium. God, how she remembered Elysium.

Potter drew himself into a sitting position, brushing himself off and shading his eyes against the sun, examined her.

"You're not Williams."

"No," she said frowning, "No I'm not."

"Back-up then. I don't suppose you know who the Turian fellow was? Or the flying squid thing?"

"You saw Nihilus?"

Harry stared at her for a moment, clearly working through something in his head. When he reached whatever conclusion he was heading towards, he wiped a hand across his face and sighed in disgust. Of course he forgot he had a gauntlet on that hand, so the only thing he accomplished was scratching his face a bit.

"Fuck! There were two of them."

She took another look around the pad, her rifle clutched loosely in her hands. The walls and floor around the pad looked like either avant-garde Elcor art, or like Salvador Dali had gone at it with a blowtorch.

Walls bent at funny angles where they too had partially melted, the deck plating was just gone in some places leaving oddly shaped holes in the ground, _and there was a damn marine with a washing machine melted onto his back!_

"How did you all survive whatever it was that went off? And how did those explosives on that ruined monorail out there not go off?"

Potter evidently gave up, flopping on his back and pulling the melted cargo container 'blanket' back over himself, "Trade secret."

Jane had no idea what was going on. What she did have was a dead Spectre, a messed up colony, a disabled rail station, and a shuttle pad that was about forty percent effective because it had _melted_. She hated these missions.

* * *

 **Exodus Cluster, Utopia System, High Orbit over Eden Prime - 06.02.2183**

"As I live and breathe, Anderson? Dave Anderson? You picked me up off Akuze, what, six years ago?"

His long years of service, and the even longer months of working with Udina, were the only things that kept a grimace off David Anderson's face. Harry could almost taste it when he entered the briefing room. Even all that experience, however, wasn't enough to keep the note of reluctance from entering Anderson's tone.

"Yes, though I'm not sure if I want that to be longer or shorter. Last time we met you stole my shuttle and left a note that said you 'had things to do' and we 'were taking too long'"

Harry rubbed his jaw and looked into the distance, "Yeah, sounds like something I'd do..."

"You left my men and I with only a comm unit. A comm unit that is _still_ confusing the R&D folks back on Earth, by the way."

Harry leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest.

"Yeah, well, I _was_ busy, and _did_ have places to be", he said defensively, "It wasn't like you didn't have people in orbit. And normal physics are just so limiting, how was I supposed to trace a cruiser in space on the other side of the planet without a server farm and comm bouy?"

Anderson gave a non-commital, "Hmm".

"Besides, the odds of your people being able to effectively study that unit, let alone replicate it, are pretty slim."

"That will hardly stop anyone from trying. You can call physics as limited as you like, but they opened the side panel and discovered enough room to park an APC, that's not something any scientist is just going to let lie."

"Well, they're welcome to waste their time. It's hardly my problem, I don't pay taxes."

"I... I refuse to engage on that. We've strayed from the topic at hand."

Harry took a moment to reflect on how much he enjoyed having a table in a briefing room. For some reason, known only to a bunch of engineers who thought listening to Turians would be a good idea, the briefing room was just a big circle of chairs next to the FTL comm link. He had nothing to do with his hands, and since all the chairs face the center of the circle, he wasn't even facing anyone directly. He was forced to turn his head. Why was this a thing?

Returning his focus to the conversation he quipped, "That's fair."

Anderson's blood pressure seemed only to increase at Harry's nonchalance, "Potter, that's a great route to get yourself detained, and based on your previously exhibited abilities, _examined_."

Harry allowed his eye to widen slightly, "It that what this is? Because I'll level with you, it's been a while since I've had a good probing. I kind of expected going into space to involve more of it, and so far it has consistently been a huge disappointment."

Anderson unknowingly echoed Jane's sentiment from just hours earlier. He really hated these kinds of missions. Or maybe he just really hated Harry Potter.

"No, Potter. We asked you here to offer you a job."

* * *

 **SSV Normandy, en route to Citadel - 06.03.2183**

"Please leave me alone."

Harry continued swinging his legs and sitting on the workbench next to Ashley Williams. Whenever she looked the other way Harry disillusioned a different tool, which, while not exactly compromising her ability to service the rifle she had disassembled out in front of her, did severely compromise her mental condition.

"C'mon, Williams! I haven't spoken to any of your delightful brood in two or three years! Just give me an update, tell me what's going on!"

She closed her eyes and repeated in a monotone, "Please leave me alone."

It was, sadly, just as effective as the last few times she had said it.

It was also a damn shame for her that Harry was patient, and her grandpa was worried for her. Harry liked General Williams, the lad was a bit misguided, but his heart was in the right place. So when Harry got a message to one of his accounts just after he hit the Normandy saying to take care of her, well, Harry _almost always_ did his best.

"Okay... What if I went for more neutral ground, your gramps said Sarah was doing well in school, isn't she set to graduate soon?"

Ashley looked at him, her eyebrows furrowing in a way that spoke to Harry of imminent danger, "Gramps?"

With an air of studied nonchalance he looked down at his nails as he said, "Yeah, he and I are old friends, we bonded years ago over a mutual dislike of war in our backyards, and a recently acquired distaste for Turians. We probably talk once a week or so over the net."

"Why? How did you meet him? He's a well-respected General, and you're an idiot."

"Well you know how it happens, you start drinking in a bar, you buy a round, start a fight, someone steals someone else's identity, and next thing you know you've got a new pen pal and you're on the Williams' Christmas card list."

"So why were you surprised to see me back on Eden Prime, if you're such a huge fan of the Williams Clan?"

"Well to be perfectly honest, after the last time I worked with the Alliance, I decide to properly cut ties. I had just gotten off Akuze, so I bought myself a nice open sector of land somewhere and hired myself out as a groundskeeper for the planetary council's manor lands. It hadn't occurred to me to do much more looking around than that."

The oldest Williams sister finally saw fit to drop her partially disassembled rifle and commit fully into the conversation, "Okay fine, with respect, just who in the hell are you? I looked you up a bit on the shuttle, and nothing around you makes any sense! You apparently single handedly stopped the invasion of Shanxi after knocking out an Alliance general and stealing his defense net access codes and oh my god, that's how you met grandad," she said, hand over her mouth, "Anyway, when it all finished you sued anyone who tried to report your name. Then at Elysium you did the same thing, and then you accepted a commission from the Alliance, which I can only guess you did so you wouldn't have to sue every journalist on the planet again. Then you show up at the Alliance's first contact with a thresher maw, killing it, and now you're some useless gardener on Eden Prime!"

She was shouting by the end, but despite the volume it was only her last words that really got to Harry.

"Hey! You take that back! Not only was I _Head_ Gardener, _thankyouverymuch_ , but my roses have won interplanetary recognition for their beauty in _every season_! The first Asari matriarch to ever land on a human colony world came because of my work!"

Ashley, Alliance Marine First Sergeant, zero-gee trained, and with some of the first Geth kills by any human, stepped back at the offense in Harry's tone.

"Sorry! Sheesh. Didn't know you took it that seriously."

Harry had to smile a bit, "Its okay, your grandfather just gives me shit all the time for the gardening thing, but what he doesn't know is that _I_ know the accounts he posts his terrible poetry under."

Ashley's eyes widened as her eyebrows rose, "Wait, he writes poetry?"

Harry gave an exaggerated grimace, "Oh god you would not believe it. I don't know if his haiku phase or his limerick phase was worse, but I do know it's all rather bad. For what it's worth, he's gotten a lot better in the last few months, I think he's been devoting more time to it."

The poor woman looked shell shocked, so Harry just went on, "What, you and your father's fascination with Tennyson and his _Ulysses_ and _The Charge of the Light Brigade_ had to come from somewhere."

Ashley closed her mouth and turned away from him, back to the workbench.

"My grandfather writes terrible poems on the extranet."

"For what it's worth, you got most of my history right. The public version anyway."

She blinked and refocused on the man still sitting on her desk, "So you're what, Harry Potter, inter-galactic man of mystery"

Harry scrunched his face, "No. Not for years, anyway. I ran that game back on earth for a while, until I had kids anyway, kids really put a damper on that way of life. James, Albus, and Lilly. Of course I think they're dead now," his brow furrowed slightly, "They were each well past a century when I left earth, back with their family on their mother's side, what I left of it anyway..."

"How old are you?"

Harry breathed in a sharp breath and began slowly, "That's not actually as easy a question as you might think. From the day I was first born, I have lived two hundred and two years," Harry turned to Ashley, smiling, "Bit proud of that actually. I believe I'm the record."

"It's weird, it just takes a smidge of power to get past the normal 'dying of old age' thing, and then after that, if you're not careful, suddenly you'll find it's really _really_ hard to actually die. Hell, I've died three times, one of them was my own wife stabbing me in the back as I slept, and yet here I am."

The middle Ms. Williams looked... traumatized. Which was a mistake as that kind of thing only encouraged Harry. Taking her stunned silence as genuine personal interest in his story, he continued.

"She enchanted the damn thing too, supposed to drain the life and power from whoever it touched. That woman spent twenty minutes too, paralyzed and while I was out she got a medical textbook and drew out a diagram on me in permanent marker, then," Harry made a _snikt_ noise, "right in the back, just between the T11 and T12 vertebrae. Which hurt like a _bitch_ , let me tell you."

Harry shook his head in disapproving silence.

"Of course she botched the enchantment, never the sharpest tool in the shed, my wife. I still died though, turns out that's a rough location to have something foreign inserted. As a part of our divorce proceedings later I insisted that she still pay for and attend a funeral, which in fairness was a pretty beautiful and moving event, though my kids never let me live that one down."

Snapping his fingers, Harry pointed at her, "Quick, what's the date?"

It was with a shaky voice she said, "Third of June, Twenty-one Eighty-three."

"I thought so! I got a sense for these things, the last time I died was one hundred years ago as of next week, June the seventh, two thousand eighty three at 06:31 in the morning. It was a horrible way to wake up, or not wake up, as the case may be."

Ashley looked like she had heard too much, and Harry felt he met his disclosure quota for the day, so he jumped off the table and with a casual wave dismissed his disillusionment over the last spanner she needed to open up the coupler holding her rifle's thermal clip.

"Well. Good talk Williams! Same time tomorrow?"

He began walking back to the Normandy's elevator, whistling lightly. Before he could make it more than three steps he caught Ashley's mildly traumatized voice behind him.

"Why?"

He turned on his heel, "Hmm?"

With more strength in her voice, she met his eyes directly, "Why are you telling me this, you haven't even told the Alliance brass this, from your file, agents have met your old neighbors and you haven't told anyone any of this, why are you telling me?"

Harry gave a real smile, "Two reasons. One, I really do like Billy. I met your father once, and he is a good man too. Billy is SO proud of you, you have no idea. His little poet-warrior. When I told him who I happened to meet in defending another colony from invasion he ordered me to take care of you if I could. He was the last one to hear my story, and I like him, so if I can, I will."

She looked intrigued and just a little embarrassed as Harry went on, "Second, and this one is my favorite, do you have any idea how many forms you're going to have to fill out and how many of those same agents you're going to have to talk to when you report this? Ooooooooh boy, I would _not_ want to be you. There's a lot more to my story then just the times I've gone and stretched the limit of my mortal coil."

He smiled as wide as he could and began whistling again as he turned and made his way to an elevator. He gave a short wave as the door closed.

As the door fully closed, Ashley Williams unknowingly echoed the words of David Anderson.

"God Dammit Potter."


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter 6**

* * *

 **Serpent Nebula, Widow System, Citadel Station, Council Chambers - 06.04.2183**

"Saren Arterius. I think any of us would know that fringe a kilometer away, but what is he doing with Geth on a human world?"

Councilor Tevos and Sparatus both made subtle glances at Valern. The STG usually had an idea one way or the other, and both the Turian and Asari councilors would eat their robes if, despite not being an official functionary of the Salarian government, all of those reports didn't make their way across his desk daily. If anyone had info on this particular unknown, it would have been him.

The Alliance forwarded the rifle cam footage from the marines that had been on over watch back at the cargo shuttle pad to the council, alongside the scratchier dock security footage, which had prompted the current meeting. The resolution on all of their video wasn't the best, and it got progressively shakier as the Geth got closer and opened fire, but the footage clearly identified the unknown Turian Harry had incinerated.

Harry, First Sergeant Williams, and Lt. Commander Shepard all stood behind Anderson and Ambassador Udina who had been addressing the council. Anderson reasoned that the ground crew who had been on station could provide relevant testimony if it came to that. In retrospect, it's possible he did not think that one all the way through.

"Excuse me, did you say _Arterius_? Saren _Arterius_?"

The councilors and Human delegation all turned and looked at the only smiling face of Harry James Potter. Udina looked mortified, Anderson looked like he needed a double whiskey, and Williams and Shepard looked like they were buying the next few rounds.

From his podium, Councilor Sparatus leaned to his right to get a view of the Human who interrupted a meeting of four of the most powerful races in the known universe, "Yes. Saren Arterius."

Somehow the Turian knew he was going to regret this next bit, but in the name of inter-species relations and the seeking of truth, there were forms for these kinds of things that had to be obeyed, "Why?"

Harry smiled widely, and bar tabs for Human diplomats across the station rose.

"Oh, well I stabbed his brother to death, what, thirty years ago now?"

The council room fell dead silent. The gurgling of the fountain near the entrance to the room tried it's best to fill the silence, but when even the other wheeling and dealing diplomats in the room had to stop to hear this Human speak, it just couldn't fill the void.

Oddly enough Udina was the one to break the silence with a quiet, "What?"

"Funny story! So this weird ship crashed landed on my farm shortly after that whole 'first contact' shindig. This was all before Shanxi properly went to hell, you understand, so technically this may have been the first in-person contact Humans and Turian-kind ever had. Anyway it crashes on my farm, just _ruining_ about a hundred hectares of my land, and when I get to the ship to try and help the crew out, this Saren guy's brother lands at the crash site in a combat skimmer and starts shooting at me!"

If he was being totally honest, Harry wasn't sure why he was there, and he was getting bored.

Sure Anderson said he wanted to put Harry's name forward for the first Human Spectre, which was cool, but Harry had actually written up a report, offloaded all of the tactical data he had, and painstakingly organized it all, detailing everything. All of which he _hated_.

He actually wrote a report to a nominal 'superior officer', and the last time he had done that was in the 2030s shortly before he quit working as an auror _for that exact fucking reason._

The council wasn't going to approve of him if they had a single functional brain cell between them, Harry was a loose cannon and he enjoyed it. There was a damn good reason he had spent the last five decades or so talking with academics online and gardening, responsibility and him were a bad mix. That kind of thing resulted in accidentally causing global warming and the extinction of the yeti.

Hearing the name Arterius brought back some fun memories, so why not indulge and show the galactic authorities who they were considering hiring?

"Of course I take exception to that, I mean who wouldn't, some ship ruins my entire crop of sugar beets and then some asshole comes down from the sky, some species I've never seen before, begins shooting at me? So I hide in the ship and spend the next half hour playing cat and mouse with this jerk through a burning freighter, the whole time listening to him rant about some kind of 'monolith' over the ship's PA. I finally turn the tables on him and track him down and he's locked himself into an escape pod and is yelling at me through the window about how I won't get away with this, and how his family will avenge him, and the might of the Hierarchy, and the Temple of Palaven and on and on. So I take this sword I have, and I stab him through the window and as he's bleeding out on the window and through the hole in the hull (which blue blood, weird am I right?) I tell him that not only does he mess with my farm, but he goes and attacks me like a crazy person? Well one day I'll find his family and kill them too."

Harry gave a very self-satisfied smirk to the now completely dumbstruck audience.

"Now I never _really_ expected to deliver on that, I was mostly trying to make his last few moments that much more shameful for him, but, well, _hell yes_ , two for two, baby!" harry pumped his arm in victory.

Councilor Valern used the following stunned silence as an opportunity to quietly inform his fellows that STG recon reports supported Potter's story.

* * *

 **Serpent Nebula, Widow System, Citadel station, Human Embassy - 06.04.2183**

"-COMPLETELY UNPROFESSIONAL, AND ABOVE ALL OF THAT HE MANAGED TO SINGLE HANDEDLY DERAIL THE DISCUSSION OF THE COUNCIL'S DISPOSITION ON A TURIAN LED ATTACK ON A HUMAN COLONY USING AN ARMY OF SYNTHETICS!"

Udina, in spite of his years of professional behavior and training in the delicate art of politics, found himself pacing against the backdrop of the Citadel presidium behind his desk and ranting about his selection for humanity candidate to the Spectres.

Anderson sat impassively on the other side of the desk, admiring the lazy patterns forming and dissolving in the air car traffic as it passed through the presidium ring. He'd just had a half liter of scotch mixed with whatever rotgut Flux was passing off as alcohol these days, so his pensiveness was only mostly chemical.

Williams had claimed it was an old marine tradition, passed on by some drill instructor (Edison? Ellison? Something like that.), and Shepard had supported her so he just ran with it. Mixing twenty-credit-a-shot authentic scotch with vodka made from what he strongly suspected was boiled leather seemed dumb at the time, but given how much easier it was making this conversation with Udina, he might have to re-think his professional standards.

He could only blame Potter for these court martial-able thoughts.

"AS IF IT WASN'T ENOUGH, HE HAD TO DISPARAGE TURIAN BLOOD AND SPEAK TO THE TURIAN COUNCILOR'S FACE ABOUT ENDING A DISTINGUISHED FAMILY LINE! HUMANITY WILL BE LUCKY TO TREAT EFFECTIVELY WITH THE HIERARCHY OVER STARPORT DOCKING LICENSES AFTER THIS!"

"I don't know," Anderson said, "We have incontrovertible proof that the council's finest Spectre, let alone one of the Hierarchy's finest operatives, was dirty. And honestly, the councilor seemed rather impressed that Potter had the guts to say any of that at the meeting. It pains me to support the man, but if anything I think his antics have given us a bit of leverage and an even stronger bargaining position. Did you see how Sparatus was sweating when Potter mentioned the Temple of Palaven?"

Udina struck his desk, making his console and all of the papers on it jump, "TURIANS DON'T SWEAT!"

David raised his hands defensively, "Figure of speech! Figure of speech!"

* * *

 **Serpent Nebula, Widow System, Citadel station, Upper Ward Alley - 06.04.2183**

Harry led an interesting life, no two ways about it. Surprise around every corner, the odd never-before-seen life form, and the occasional Krogan weapons engineer looking for a pen pal.

It led to a set of habits he spent a few decades honing both before and after he left Earth. Naturally they became a lot more important when he left the Human solar system and things started really getting weird.

First, he never went anywhere un-armed. He was once attacked by a werewolf in a nightclub lady's room in Japan, and the fight took easily four times longer than it would have had he been armed. Now that may have been due to the poor quality of the porcelain in that particular establishment, shattering after only a single impact with a werewolf's head, but Harry firmly believed that having his wand on him would also have solved the issue quicker.

Second, he always made sure he had an exit. As he followed the directions given to him by Morlan of Morlan's Famous Shop to the nearest bathroom, there was a refurbished kodiak waiting for him in a bay off Kiothi ward, and an air car piloted by a VI orbiting the wards near his location.

Third, his invisibility cloak, a cloak capable of shielding him from death itself, was never outside of skin contact with him. A small and skin-tight bracelet on his left wrist took care of that. It was made from titanium he had personally hewn from a wall in the deepest mine the goblins had ever dug. Harry purified the metal himself, just minutes after taking it from the mine, and formed the trinket. Using magic he made up on the spot, due to both a lack of foresight and being drunk, he bound the bracelet to his being. The resurrection stone was mounted in the bracelet, and no less than twenty one different space expansion charms layered into it made a small indentation on it large enough to hold the cloak.

Harry had a bad week at work and was feeling rather dramatic. He started drinking pretty heavily with his old friend Neville, and ended up breaking into the goblin mines to do all of the work himself because he 'couldn't trust any race smaller than his penis to make a decent piece of jewelry'.

Neville later claimed, in his testimony before the International confederation of Wizards investigative subcommittee investigating the beginning and end of the brief Goblin Revolt of 2027, that Harry had forced to come with him at wand point, threatening to wreak unspeakable evil on (adopt) Neville's first child if he didn't help.

Harry last few habits were each relatively self-explanatory. He made a point to always speak the local language, he never traveled without enough money to fund a small pirate band in case he got the itch for adventure, and he always did whatever it took to know the location of all local water closets.

It was this last habit that led him to the door immediately to the right of the hall leading to Chora's Den. Morlan said the bathrooms were here, and Morlan had great reviews on the extranet, so here he was.

Harry put a hand lazily through the door's holographic interface and when it opened took a few steps inside. It was clearly an alley, which was weird on a space station, but then these people rely on a race of self destructing space-bugs for all their infrastructure needs.

He was about five meters in when he figured out that Morlan _may_ have written his own good reviews. Morlan's shop may not have even been famous, _that bastard_.

In front of him were a Turian and two Salarians confronting what looked like a Quarian, but in fairness could have been a really tall Volus or one of those Raloi. Harry had heard some stuff, and you could hide a lot of feathers under an environmental suit. Then of course the fuckers saw him and out of nowhere everyone but the Quarian started shooting.

There were a lot of things Harry was prepared to accept in the name of interspecies peace.

Being shot at was surprisingly not on that list.

"This is not a bathroom... ," He ducked and rolled to his right, a small alcove protecting him from incoming fire which impacted the wall next to him. The Quarian threw out some kind of tech grenade, which blew with a bright red flash and caused all of the guns on the far side of the alley to short circuit.

Ducking out of cover Harry used the Brawler at his hip to punch a hole in the visor of both Salarians. It took four shots each, but he'd been at the game long enough for eight shots to take him a fair bit less than two seconds.

It turns out standing in the middle of an alley without cover is less of a good idea than it seems on paper. (Hint: does not seem like a good idea on paper.)

The unknown (Harry was just going to go with Quarian) ran back towards his supporting fire, while the Turian that remained behind was still trying to eject his thermal clip or at least expose it to air so it would cool quicker.

Harry put an arm around the Quarian as it/he/she threw themselves into cover beside him. The Turian ejected his clip entirely and slotted a new one in. Quick as a flash, Harry drew his wand, swished, flicked and dragged the poor bastard into the air above the cover he was trying to hide behind attempted to use.

The Quarian, _definitely_ a her, pulled a collapsed shotgun from a deep pocket at her thigh, and curved around Harry to aim down the alley. Harry raised his pistol in his offhand, and the pair fired as one on the Turian who had been shouting about not getting paid enough for this.

It was almost worth a sigh as the lifeless body floated in the air. How many times had they shouted about not being payed enough for this, especially after he became involved? He sympathized, it's not like he collected a pay check for any of the trouble he got in to.

From immediately next to him and beneath his arm, the Quarian offered her hand, "Tali Zorah nar Rayya."

Harry accepted the three fingered hand, "Harry James Potter."

They shook briefly.

"Zorah family name, nar Rayya, of the ship Rayya?"

It was hard to tell behind the helmet, but Harry was pretty sure he impressed her. He may have been over two hundred years old, but showing off a bit for a girl never got old.

"How did you know that? I've been on pilgrimage for two years and I haven't met someone who wasn't a diplomat that paid the slightest attention to us."

They began moving out, Harry automatically guiding their steps towards the nearest C-Sec station, "Believe it or not, I learned from a Krogan. Some of them are not only well versed in Quarian culture, but surprisingly concerned for its state."

"Krogan?"

Harry smiled widely, "They may be a bunch of brutal and brain dead muscle piles, but as time goes on and there are fewer and fewer of them, they often find themselves concerned that others _aren't_ brutal brain dead muscle piles. There are a few that think the way to survive the genophage is to spread the way of the Krogan. They're rather like the most blood thirsty missionaries you'll ever hear about. And you've got to remember, there are quite a few old enough to remember what you all looked like without masks and enviro suits."

It was hard to tell behind the mask, but Harry's frowning woman senses were tingling.

"Don't worry Miss nar Rayya. I've got this one for you."

* * *

 **Serpent Nebula, Widow System, Citadel station, Citadel Security Headquarters - 06.04.2183**

The pair reached C-sec and went to give evidence on the event, also to find a clean room and a registered doctor versed in Quarian physiology. Tali insisted that none if it was necessary, and that she'd been shot before and she'd taken her share of suit breaches, but Harry was having none of it.

Sure, she was scrappy and seemed like she could mostly take care of herself, but she was throwing off waves of 'I'm young, naive, and cute! Take advantage of me!' and Harry couldn't live with himself if he didn't take care of her and at least set her up in a better place than he had found her.

Given that he had found her in an alley which a Salarian merchant identified as a bathroom, that wasn't likely to be very hard.

As they passed out of the elevator Harry remembered that his life wasn't ever simple enough to just _do_ things like that. He missed his farm. Back then all he had to worry about was how his vegetables kept randomly gaining sentience and trying to kill him.

"Potter! Hey Potter! I've been looking for you everywhere! Harry Potter!"

Harry almost face palmed, before remembering he had his gauntlets on. A Turian with blue colonial markings, decked out in standard C-Sec armor, was shouting his name from across the C-Sec atrium thing and running for him. At his side, Tali cocked her head at him.

"Potter! Hello, my name is Garrus Vakarian, I'm the C-Sec agent assigned to figuring out how much damage Saren did before you killed him. I was hoping to get a chance to talk to you for a minute, but the bureaucracy refused me clearance to try and contact you through the embassy or your ummm... corporate holdings."

"You guys could track that? Damn. They told me the silent partnership thing was ironclad."

Garrus scraped the tip of his fringe awkwardly with one claw, "You are aware that Hanar evolved on a water world, right?"

"Yes..."

"Well did _they_ use the word ironclad? Culturally that phrase is indicative of a temporary fixture, because of all the rust, and, you know, corrosion."

Harry opened his mouth, closed it again, smiled, and shook his head, "Hanar. You never know what you're going to get."

The Turian twitched his mandibles in what Harry recognized as a Turian smile, "True enough! There's one down on the presidium right now trying to preach-"

Tali had enough of the not situation-specific conversation and chose to butt in, "Hold on, you're investigating Saren? Spectre Saren Arterius?"

Harry's eyes shone with mirth as he corrected, " _Former_ Spectre Saren Arterius."

Tali cocked her head to the side again, prompting, "I may have burned him alive."

The helmet didn't move an inch and if anything Harry loosely detected a raised eyebrow, "A little bit. Allegedly."

No response from either of his alien friends.

"Let's move on."

* * *

 **Serpent Nebula, Widow System, Citadel station, Citadel Security Headquarters, The office of Garrus Vakarian - 06.04.2183**

"We need a functional Beacon, and lo and behold, the apes found one on Eden Prime."

"From the Beacon to the Conduit."

"Yes."

"And the return of the Reapers..."

...

...

...

"Well shit."

The dual tones of Vakarian's flanged voice filled his small office more completely than the Human and Quarian he shared it with ever could.

Tali'Zorah was sitting in the office's second chair and affecting an air of nonchalance. In Harry's studied opinion she was pulling it of pretty well too, and as a snarky asshole who often revealed tantalizing information nonchalantly, it really spoke to him.

"I don't suppose you have any idea what was on that Beacon, or what these Conduit and Reaper things are?"

"I pulled that audio out of a Geth platform I disabled on a small moon out in the Argos Rho cluster. They self-destruct their memory banks automatically when the platform undergoes catastrophic failure, so I was lucky to salvage as much as I did."

Vakarian began to play with his console for a bit, cleaning up the audio and running it through a few analysis programs.

Harry and Tali gave him some time to work, both looking around the office. It was functional and sterile in a very Turian way, but here and there you could see spots of the person that occupied the place. The tiny rebellion of multicolored pens, an expensive and definitely non-standard data pad, a row of medals for marksmanship framed in an understated way...

"Well shit."

Harry could tell that was coming. He smiled.

"New problem?"

"Only if you like ancient and wealthy Asari matriarchs assisting rogue Spectres in galactic-level sedition."

"I knew today was going to be a good day."

/-/

Harry sent the bare bones of the data he had lucked into to the Human embassy, prompting several individuals station-wide to wonder why he had been left to wander alone in the heart of galactic commerce, and in turn was sent a strongly worded summons to the Council Chambers.

If Harry didn't know better, he nearly would have thought Ambassador Udina didn't like him.

Moments after Harry's omni-tool interrupted their impromptu poker game, Garrus received a similar invitation to present his findings by his boss, some Turian Harry was given to understand was called Palin.

There was much grumbling and sighing as Harry took the cards back and converted them back to omni-gel. He loved that damn stuff, so useful, which was why he kept a small ocean of it in a custom space-expanded container.

The three of them moved out of the small office and into the halls of C-Sec, making their way towards the rapid transit point, the normal workings of C-Sec keeping the journey interesting. A Volus was ratting out a business partner, Harry was eighty-five percent certain a rogue AI was routing funds through one of the standard comm screens, a Krogan was being warned against threatening some guy named Fist and-

Wait, back up a sec.

Harry knew that guy!

"Wrex?"

The Krogan shoved the Human cop in front of him away and turned to the puny Human who called him. Not many in this system actually knew his name without him having threatened them, or their being in C-Sec and thus being familiar with his rap sheet. The Citadel was the place he typically found his boss's boss's boss, or on happier occasions like this one, expensive targets.

"Who are you, Human?"

Harry could tell the Human thing was supposed to be an insult, but he was familiar with Krogan bravado, and in general it was hard to offend him without gunfire being involved.

"Harry Potter, but are you Urdnot Wrex?"

Wrex's eyes narrowed.

"Potter? You're that Human that Fortak is always trying to comm me about. I almost lost a bounty on Omega because he hacked my Omni tool to make sure I was getting his messages."

Harry smiled widely, "He told me about that! Said you were hunting down Vorcha in some kind of power tunnels for two weeks because of it!"

The much larger being seemed to growl at how light Harry's tone was, causing Garrus to caress the pistol at his hip and Tali to subtly position herself so that Harry was between her and Wrex.

Harry let the anger brew for a moment before reaching out to clasp forearms with easily his third or fourth favorite fish-monster from beyond the stars, "Good to see you!"

Wrex seemed amused by the cheek of the diminutive Human in front of him. It took a quad to mess with an alien that had literally eaten things larger than you. If Fortak wasn't lying, then the runt might even be able to put up a bit of a fight.

"We need to go, but-" wait, wasn't he _trying_ to get fired?

"Actually, Wrex, have you ever met the Citadel Council?"


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter 7**

* * *

 **Serpent Nebula, Widow System, Citadel Station, Council Chambers - 06.04.2183**

Harry and his very recently founded entourage piled into the elevator leading to the Council chambers. He took the opportunity to double check the visual he was going to be sending out when he showed up.

Tali'Zorah nar Rayya, a Quarian he met less than three hours before, was visibly nervous and attempting to maintain her calm. Given that she was going to be one of maybe ten of her species to have appeared in person before the Council in the last three hundred years, and that she was doing so alongside a Krogan that scared her enviro suit's reclamation into overdrive, and that she was follwoing a human that would have either been institutionalized or made Captain in the Flotilla, she felt she was doing pretty well. Pretty well still meant a Hanar could effectively interpret her body language as screaming 'DEAR GOD WHAT DID I DO TO GET HERE!', but to her credit, she was still going strong.

Harry was certainly impressed.

Garrus Vakarian, a Turian that Harry felt knew a lot more about him than he was comfortable with, seemed oddly at ease. Something about the entire sequence of events that led to where they were seemed to tickle the tin-plated bird-man, and given that the Krogan in the room had let _him_ be the one to put his back to the wall in the elevator, he was doing just fine and dandy. Can Turians do that whole 'happily idle whistling' thing?

Harry resolved to ask later.

Urdnot Wrex, the well over five hundred year old, only-mostly-defunct, leader of clan Urdnot was actually smiling. The invitation to come and meet the council had actually been the only thing that got him out of C-Sec without violence. His inability to promise not to introduce this 'Fist' character to the business end of his shotgun hadn't been persuading the cops to let him go.

Overall, the crew he had with him was probably going to raise all kinds of questions, and it was definitely going to raise some red flags with diplomatic security. If Harry was lucky, these wonderful bastards would make Anderson and Udina second guess every decision that led them to him.

He found a _really_ nice homestead on a backwater colony called Freedom's Progress, centered around a beautiful little knoll that would be _perfect_ to anchor a ward stone to. God willing, this time next week he could be there and planting traditional colonial foliage. You know, beets, lettuce, potatoes, and cannabis.

/-/

When they actually got in front of the Council, the hearing was already underway. Udina and the Turian named Palin both seemed to be stalling until Harry and Garrus arrived with their evidence.

Anderson, Shepard, and Williams all stood back and to the side, looking for the entire world like a bunch of bored security agents. Harry and his crew's appearance made a small trill of something that looked a lot like fear pass through the trio, but even if he was trying to get fired, he was definitely still on their side. The idea that they would be afraid of him and what he was about to do was ridiculous. Totally ridiculous.

Harry contemplated buying his new farm right there.

Palin and Udina reintroduced Harry and Garrus, prompting the Turian to share the bulk of the evidence first.

The blue faced Turian concretely linked Saren across several fake identities to controlling interests in the galactic-level corporation Binary Helix, and to significant investments in a number of other colonial corps. Of particular note was a private bio-lab held by Binary Helix on Noveria, his declassified transit records showed an anomalous number of personal visits to the lab over the last five years. For that matter they also showed an anomalous number of site visits to another similar facility out on the rim world Virmire, which appeared to be held entirely outside of corporate control.

Tali was introduced, and after she spent a few minutes establishing her expertise and various certifications in galactic standard electronics, shared the evidence she had found, linking Saren to Matriarch Benezia. Garrus showed tax papers and declassified mission reports linking Benezia through her followers to suspected Geth locations in the Skyllian Verge, and to the company of the late Mr. Arterius.

It was all quite impressive, left little to chance, and adequately explained a number of avenues that could be used to determine how much damage the council's top Spectre had truly done in selling out the sentients of the galaxy to pissed off artificial intelligences and a group called the Reapers...

...which was why Harry didn't pay attention to a single second of it.

He had found something more interesting to poke at.

Councilor Sparatus seemed genuinely angry about Saren, and frequently interjected and asked questions.

Councilor Valern nodded his head frequently, and forwarded corroborating information to his fellows when the question of Benezia's connection to Saren was raised.

Those made sense.

What didn't make sense was that since entering the room councilor Tevos made and instantly broke eye contact with Wrex twenty-two separate times. When they entered she had said one word in greeting to Harry and Garrus, before noticing Wrex and looking like she had swallowed a live animal.

Wrex, on the other hand, wore a smile so wide he looked like an ad for a rough-and-tumble Asari dentist, and had been staring straight at Tevos since that 'Hello' came across.

Harry smelled adventure.

The opening he was looking for had the courtesy to arrive just two minutes later, when Sparatus finally completely bought into the evidence, "I... We... have little choice but to accept how far Saren fell before his death, and how far his corruption has spread into other galactic political concerns. At our last meeting we formally began this investigation into his activities, but now I put forward that we must actively pursue all leads into the threats posed by this 'Conduit' and these 'Reapers'. Saren Arterius was never known for making poor decisions, so as we now see he has indeed been plotting against galactic stability, we must work to counter these interests he advanced. Anything less could be a potentially fatal mistake."

He, Valern, and Tevos seemed to hold a quick and silent vote, confirming Sparatus' proposal.

The Turian spoke again, "We must commend the actions of Harry Potter and the Human Systems Alliance for bringing all of this to light."

Pay dirt. Harry's smile looked almost as predatory as Wrex's.

"I can't take all of the credit, and indeed even the Alliance can't take all credit. Without my friends here, Garrus Vakarian, Tali'Zorah nar Rayya, and indeed," this was his stab in the dark, "My old friend Urdnot Wrex here," Tevos betrayed over a century of political experience at the top by visibly cringing at the words, "The extent of Saren's action would never have been fully revealed."

Wrex looked at Harry with a significantly greater amount of respect in his eyes as he stepped forward, "No, no, no! Don't let Harry be modest here, in over seven hundred years I've fought Asari commandos, and hell, even Matriarchs that couldn't have done as much."

At this, all of the Systems Alliance personnel were confused. No one had any idea how Harry, whose boots had never before left a human controlled world, was old friends with a Krogan without any of their agents knowing. And of all Krogan, this one?

Garrus and Tali were also focused along those lines, each of them was fairly certain Harry had only met Wrex an hour ago.

Both of these groups were, of course, confused for the wrong reason.

What the on looking politicians, and two out of three councilors, were confused by was how fifteen words could hit an Asari matriarch harder than ten decades worth of political infighting combined.

Where she stood Tevos was shaking, just oh-so-slightly. If her species had sweat glands, she would be a half step away from a full onset flop sweat.

"Councilor Tevos! I almost didn't notice you there! It is Tevos T'Hazi right? Did you know I met your mother once, years ago, and she told me if I was to ever meet you I should extend her regards?"

The councilor stiffened before biting off in an icy tone, "I have no idea what you're talking about, and would refer any further statements or inquiries to the active C-Sec case files regarding the deaths of my sisters."

The room fell silent in a way that Harry's story from earlier in the day just couldn't quite match, and the blue skinned councilor nearly tripped as she walked away into an anteroom off the Councilor's dais.

Harry smiled widely, and with a disturbingly practiced gesture, authorized the purchase of a few hundred-dozen hectares of land on an obscure human colony. Thank god Asari politics were just as bitchy and murder-y as old Earth sexists dreamed they would be.

* * *

 **Serpent Nebula, Widow System, Citadel station, Closed council chambers - 06.04.2183**

"I don't like it."

Sparatus hurriedly coughed in order to suppress a laugh. Even Valern, with his uncharacteristically (for a Salarian) even disposition, seemed to be suppressing giggles.

Tevos narrowed her eyes at her colleagues. The lack of personal support was entirely in line with who and what they were, the Citadel Council was, at best, a poorly disguised attempt to justify the economic concerns of the Big Three races as galaxy-wide issues. That didn't make the two people she had worked with for the last ten years laughing at her sting any less though.

With malice she shot back at the Turian, "Shut it, need I remind you of his knowledge of the Temple of Palaven?"

Sparatus managed to stop his poorly suppressed laughing and sobered very quickly, "We all have things we'd like to keep hidden."

Valern added his two credits with, "I don't," causing his fellows to begin laughing outright.

Tevos broke off her chuckling first, "Just because your people don't politic in the same way as ours hardly means you have nothing to hide. Kindly recall that the STG is far from the _only_ intelligence agency in the galaxy."

A flanged voice brought up one of the group's concerns with the choice before them, "If he is actually friendly with Urdnot Wrex of all people, we may end up confronting the Krogan issue decades before our projections."

Each of the three Councilors took a moment to consider the situation.

Harry James Potter.

In his first full day off sovereign Human ground, and he made contact with a former Spectre candidate, the daughter of a Quarian Admiral, and a Krogan battlemaster who personally dated back to the end of the Rebellion.

He idly brought up the Temple of Palaven in open conversation, he brought the Krogan who killed Tevos' sisters (at her order), and his personal intervention was all that had stopped their former top agent from acquiring something he had thought of as being significant to his sedition.

Potter had a whole lot of that 'impartial force for good' thing going. His record, both supplied by the Alliance and dug up by the STG, confirmed significant mental illness as a likely result of PTSD as well as a hero complex confirmed through his actions both in and before the twenty-second century.

Worst case scenario, he turns out to just be a halfway decent Spectre.

If he turns out good, the Council made a good decision, they effectively replaced a bad asset, and pay rises all around. If he turns out bad, Humanity loses face, and discrete pay rises from individual governments all around.

Harry James Potter becoming a Spectre looked to be a win-win, especially given that the average life expectancy of a new Spectre was best measured in galactic-standard months. Half the reason Saren had been top dog was purely due to the fact that he survived forty years of ops before evidently turning on his masters. They gave a pretty speech about Spectres being born and not trained, but the reality of the galaxy was that the agents that could actually survive mercs, the Shadow Broker, and fear of being turned into double agents by their home governments were few and far between.

Potter and his knowledge were temporary threats at best. Really they might as well give him the position. It was the least they could do for a guy who was practically on his death bed already.

* * *

 **Serpent Nebula, Widow System, Citadel station, Elevator to council chambers - 06.05.2183**

"NO."

"Yes."

"NO."

"Yes."

"NO."

"Yes! No. No. Wait. I'm not doing this. Anderson?"

Shepard turned to the wall and placed her forehead against it. The plas-steel was chilled, and having spent thirty minutes with Potter she already had a headache. Anderson stood forward from where he had been watching Harry and Jane, clearing the grin from his face.

"Why are you even here, we told you why we were bringing you-"

"BECAUSE I DIDN'T THINK YOU IDIOTS WERE ACTUALLY GOING TO FOLLOW THROUGH! Yesterday I brought the Krogan that killed the Asari councilor's family with me to the Council chambers, and last night I helped him assault a strip club in the lower wards to kill an idiot that called himself Fist! Why in the hell are you still hiring me! Is everyone here stupid!?"

Tali bumped Garrus' shoulder from where they stood at the back of the elevator. He turned to her visor and caught the twin rising eyebrows and the wide smile. He answered with his own smile and shoved her shoulder back. Wrex was just lost in thought with a smile on his face, probably fantasizing about all the murders, or rather 'legal exercises of self-defence' during the execution of his 'legal authority as a licensed bounty hunter'. Williams was quietly trying to talk Udina down from slamming his head into the elevator wall.

Harry continued to be a problem, "I would have never come if I didn't think you guys would wise up, I don't want to do this!"

Anderson put his arm around Harry's shoulders, "Well, look. No one is happy. BUT, on the other hand, it's too late so just deal with it," he said, patting Harry soothingly.

Harry's shoulders fell, "The last time I agreed to take responsibility for something from you bastards, my whole unit died to an alien life-form we'd never seen before," and as if to himself, "The time before that I lost a whole planet."

"I don't want to do this again."

For a moment the only sounds in the elevator were the low hum of the mass effect drivers, and the creak of armor-shifting. From the back, Wrex's baritone broke in, "Grow a quad, Punk."

Harry sighed deeply.

"Yeah, thanks Wrex."

/-/

"-both our first and last line of defense, the safety of the galaxy is theirs to uphold."

"You are the first Human Spectre, Mr. Potter, this is an achievement for you and your species."

Harry stood alone before the council, looking profoundly unhappy. It was a small comfort to him that at least the press were legally obligated to _not_ cover this. His solitary form stood in front of the three alien dictators, one five foot eight inch man attempting to assert strength and authority in front of three people who stood above the known galaxy.

"On behalf of both myself and Humanity; Thanks, I guess. We appreciate that you're taking us seriously and allowing us to take this next step into responsibility as a species on the galactic stage, and..."

Harry visibly looked down at his hand where he had a cue card poorly hidden.

"...that you're giving us the chance to prove we're mature as a species, and ready..."

Harry slipped the card into a pocket at his thigh and cursed quietly as he looked at his arm. With a suck and a hiss, he broke the hermetic seal on his gauntlet, removing it and clearly displaying a bunch of small print in permanent ink across his forearm.

"Da da da... errr... Please accept these thanks on the part of the Human Systems Alliance. We wish to represent a better tomorrow for the galactic community. Please accept further humble thanks on our part so we can..."

Harry reattached his left gauntlet, leaving it hanging loose, and with another conspicuous noise, detached his right gauntlet.

"Hmm... in honor of this occasion I propose we meet quarterly at this time to keep our understanding of each other's political and social concerns current."

Harry slipped his right hand back into his gauntlet, and with two quick gestures snapped the gloves into his suit. Straightening his back, he actually made eye contact with the three beings at the focus of the hall, and for the first time since the audience began, he actually looked like a Spectre candidate.

"Look. Udina had a lot of things he wanted me to say. Humanity for that matter has a lot of things it wants me to say. That's not me, I don't do that, which I imagine is something you knew before we got involved and you swore me in, but in case you did not I'll just state it plainly, I leave politicking to you politician types."

Folding his arms across his chest, he continued, "I've dealt with loads of red tape across many governments, loads 'black ops', and way more than my fair share of tin-plated despots. I can say _with_ authority that me _and_ authority? It's never worked out."

Now it must be noted that, historically speaking, no Spectre candidate had ever done anything other than accept their commission quietly. Especially in front of the full Council. Sure, some had reservations, some had qualms, and some had even gone as far as having pre-existing conflicting loyalties. More than a few had done so without dignity, whether from haven been 'convinced' to join the program after an evening of enhanced interrogation, or from just crying from happiness (a disturbingly common Turian response). However, not a single one had ever valued their new position so little as to warn the council like Harry did.

"I've yet to meet a government worth respect, and I've yet to read a constitution worth the ink it was written with, if I'm being honest."

At this point politicians from every species and special interest group in Citadel space were staring at Harry.

"What I believe in is actually simple. Everyone deserves a right to assent to their future. They can be indentured, they can be drug addicts, or they can be colonists working for some corporation. As long as every sentient being is given a choice for the future they hold, you will never hear from me. I swear on the blood flowing through my veins, and upon every power I can call upon to uphold the sanctity of galactic self-determination above all else."

Their smugly-superior-group-approval period was much longer than normal. Each staring at their fellows, and exchanging glances like only colleagues of more than a decade can. Tevos was worried, and Valern didn't have nearly the amount of information he was comfortable with. Normally they knew what they were deciding on before it ever got to the public chambers, now though, they weren't so sure.

Sparatus, on the other hand, looked to his comrades and emphatically nodded yes.

Valern's eventual nod was less emphatic by orders of magnitude, but still present, which left Asari Councilor Tevos herself as the final gap between Harry James Potter and official Spectre status. The monogender hesitated to give the final approval, before she finally fell in line with her fellows.

As if any previous Spectre had ever bargained over carte blanche legal authority...

Three votes came in, three authorizations came up positive, and Harry James Potter cursed deeply and profoundly.

Harry James Potter. Spectre.

Ah, God had a new title. Fuck.

And twenty-five square miles of farmland on Freedom's Progress that he was never going to be able to develop.

 _Fuck._


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter 8**

* * *

 **Serpent Nebula, Widow System, Citadel station, Council chambers - 06.05.2183**

"Spectre. We did not empower you to add another peace keeper to the ranks. You have an assignment."

Valern leaned to Sparatus, interrupting his train of thought apparently, and whispering something into his...

Harry had to pause and consider. Turians didn't have visible ears... They _did_ have weird hexagonal plate things where an ear would be on a human. Was there an ear hole in there somewhere? Was it one of those 'just very sensitive to vibrations' things? Not for the first time Harry idly wished he had studied medicine, but tech had seemed like a lot more fun in the twenty-one hundreds. Maybe it was beneath their fringe-thing?

Did Turian moms tell their kids to make sure they washed behind their fringe?

He shook his head, and Valern transferred files to Sparatus and Tevo's consoles.

Tevos spoke without looking up, "Spectre, you will hunt down any and all evidence of former Spectre Saren Arterius' work. You will focus on the targets identified as 'Conduit' and 'Reaper', but you will follow whatever evidence you encounter as your investigation permits. We will forward you all relevant intelligence we have on the locations Officer Vakarian's investigation has identified. C-Sec will continue to parse Arterius' reports and files for more information, and for the time being we will reassign Officer Vakarian to you as a liaison."

The Asari sighed and paged through a new file on the console in front of her.

"On a less formal note, if you plan on being even the slightest bit effective you will need to purchase a ship and find a crew. As a rule, the Council does not provide direct funding to Spectres, we only assist with military clearances and accreditation. No financial strings between us allows you to maintain the autonomy you need to operate effectively, and to bargain on even terms with third parties. Most Spectres are primarily financed through their home governments. In your case, as you aren't a part of the formal Systems Alliance structure, you lack that traditional source of support. However your... hmmm," the monogender's cheeks flushed a darker blue, "your corporate holdings seem sufficient to see you through. If you should find yourself coming up short, contact requisitions through C-Sec and there may be some help for you."

Udina broke into the conversation from the side of the audience platform, his tone unseasonably rushed, "Humanity will not let our first Spectre stand alone! Nor can we allow him to rely on his... less savory sources of income," the ambassador didn't even try to hide his disgust, "Rest assured councilors, Potter will be operational inside twenty-four hours."

"We expect good things from you, Agent Potter. Not just because you killed our top agent either. Get to it."

For his first official act as what amounts to a galactic level James Bond, Harry turned to the Krogan next to him.

"Hey Wrex, you up for shooting some robots?"

* * *

 **Serpent Nebula, Widow System, Citadel station, Human Embassy - 06.05.2183**

"So you're just giving me the ship?"

Harry was impressed. Not even he would have trusted him with an actual military ship, let alone some kind of super-prototype-thing like the Normandy.

Just look at the damage he did on Shanxi with stolen air cars.

Fortunately reality crashed back in on him as Anderson and Udina both shouted "NO!" simultaneously from across the desk.

Harry nodded, that made a lot more sense.

Anderson leaned forward, "What we're doing is giving you nominal command of it. You direct it, you help crew it, in a pinch you give tactical advice, but actual command of the vessel will go to Lieutenant Commander Shepard."

Udina nodded almost violently next to Anderson.

"You need a combat effective, fast, and quiet ride in order for you to complete your mission. Especially given which end of the Traverse you're going to be spending most of your time on. That is something the Alliance would be only too happy to provide, but we cannot, and will not, just give you the ship."

Harry put on a disappointed air, and surprisingly got a response from Udina.

"It's not that we don't trust you, it's to... keep you autonomous from the Alliance. Yes! No direct ties allows you to maintain impartiality as a Spectre, which is just the face we want to show to the galactic community. The ship and its normal operating crew are all assigned on secondment to you for the duration of your investigation."

Harry was impressed again, that was solid back-justification, easily 8 out of 10. Good show.

"What we're going to do is our best to keep everyone involved as covered as we can," Anderson explained, "Udina is right in that you need to be as impartial as possible. At the same time we can't just _give_ a few billion credits in practical R&D away. We'll have all the paperwork for you to be reinstated at the rank you held before completed and a keystroke from being implemented. As long as this all keeps quiet, we're good. If the Alliance Brass begin to ask questions we can't wave off with the 'Secondment to a Spectre' card, then you get fully reinstated, backdated to today."

"It's the best way to make sure we all get what we need," Udina finished.

"Well on that note, there may be a few other things I need outside this whole ship song-and-dance. Namely a license to a few sets of Kassa Fabrication armor, and clearance to buy from Hahne Kedar's Shadow Works."

Anderson sat forward, "Now wait a minute, I've seen your armor. That's a custom suit of Ursa Mark Ten, you're asking for a few million credits of tech that has only marginally better shielding and support, the Shadow works clearance was already on the table, but do you have any idea how much what you're asking for costs?"

"Hey! Before now my armor was just for the universe's semi-annual attempts on my life. You've volunteered me to go off into active combat, which is cool, but if you expect me to choose to run directly into gunfire you better believe you're buying me armor with better plating. The barriers on their Colossus line may only be marginally better, but don't think I haven't seen the specs on their new energized plating. I trust plate more than I do any barrier."

Udina looked askance at the only soldier on his side of the bargaining, only for Anderson to begrudgingly nod.

The politician looked back at the Spectre, "We can get you one. Your crew one the other hand is different. You've managed to attract three non-humans even, does Kassa even make armor for them?"

Harry rolled his eyes, "Just because they're not human doesn't mean no one shoots at them."

Anderson and Harry took their turn to meet eyes and share a moment. Politicians.

"Is there anything _else_ ridiculous you want from us?"

Harry smiled widely, "Yes! I want a tank."

* * *

 **Serpent Nebula, Widow System, Citadel station, Human Systems Alliance docking bay sector, SSV Normandy - 06.05.2183**

Tali'Zorah nar Rayya sat on an empty cargo container in the open bay of an experimental Human Systems Alliance frigate.

There were a couple parts of that sentence that didn't exactly jive with her experience and her normal MO, but when you go on pilgrimage you get used to not being used to things.

Back in the flotilla (IN NOT ON, stupid xenos always missed the distinction) it was a rare container that was anything less than full. When space is at a premium, you learn pretty quickly to apply your RFID spray tags to things and store them wherever you can. She lost the bubble she grew up in (damn Humans and their damn hamster balls) and found it and her positively ancient tag sprayed four years later, in a crate on a repurposed Batarian mining vessel. Bit of a trip from the Rayya, but relatively common.

Ah, the Rayya. She still missed it. All of the air filters in her hab section were re-purposed, an extremely common phenomena given that the last authentic Quarian engineering died three hundred years ago, but what it meant was that everywhere in her 'neighborhood' there was a constant rattle. Loose filters, too tight filters that had corroded around the seals, whatever, the point was that it was never silent, silence indicated a lack of airflow and a serious problem. Ever since her common name stopped being vas Rayya and became nar Rayya, she was constantly confronted by the silence that these Others preferred their systems to run in.

It was easy to see the how and why behind how insular most Quarian got. Leaving the Flotilla was weird, and all these damn xenos were _really_ weird. Or maybe Quarian were weird. Three centuries afloat in space might do that to you.

Anyway. Why was she here? Why in the name of the home world was she on an experimental alliance frigate?

First, following work as a migrant systems engineer, and vague rumors of Geth beyond the Perseus Veil, (Stupid name for a nebula, and why did all of the big names on the astrogation charts end up conceptually Asari?) she found one of the damned things when her ship stopped to dump it's static charge on a moon out in the Hydra system.

Second, she gets the bright idea to hack it.

Third, when she gets lucky enough to pull literally any data (from the solid state drives located in the thing's knee of all places) she finds data on one of the galaxy's only publicly operating Spectres.

Fourth, she tries to sell it to the Shadow Broker, in retrospect an amateur's mistake, only to get shot at when Saren got to her contact first.

Then she gets rescued by one of the single most insane beings to have ever existed, and instead of the doctor the weirdo insisted she go see, she ended up joining him on some kind of galactic-level spy campaign.

Tali kicked her legs out, letting artificial gravity (just under one standard gee, a smidge heavy by Quarian standards) them back down to hit the side of the crate. Long practice kept her from sighing. It always fogged her helmet, and she _hated_ her defogger. Even with years of playing with settings she could never quite seem to keep it from drying out her eyes when-

Wait.

That was four impacts on the container, and unless she made the mistake of having a drink at a Turian bar again but decided on elective surgery this time, she only had two legs...

Ah...

"So whatcha thinking about?"

The insane one.

"Well, for one, how did you manage to find a set of Kassa fabrication armor in my exact size?"

The insane one looked down at the box they were sitting on, his eyes widening comically as if seeing it for the first time.

"Oh, well, funny story."

"Three different humans have said that to me, and it has yet to be a funny story."

"Oh don't get me started on idiomatic expressions. It was bad enough when I only had to deal with them in one language. Damn yanks. You ever studied Asari?"

"No, and you're avoiding the question."

His shoulders dropped and he looked away from her. He was embarrassed!

"Well I never got you to that doctor, so I took a couple of scans of you and ran them by a... Well I guess you could call her a friend of mine. She knows quite a bit about Quarian physiology and assured me you were doing okay. In exchange for this _very_ minor and unlicensed violation of your privacy, I figured I'd buy you a bit of a better enviro suit, and maybe we might call it even. Especially since you would get a gift and I wouldn't have to tell you that I know what you look like naked."

Again, there were a couple things about what she just heard that didn't quite jive. She was going to start at the last bit and work her way forward. A subtle gesture lowered the volume on her vocalizer to a whisper.

"YOU'VE SEEN ME NAKED!?"

He winced.

"Err... yes? A bit."

"HOW! THAT DOESN'T EVEN MAKE SENSE, I ALWAYS TUNE MY KINETIC BARRIERS TO STOP SCANS FROM PERVERTS LIKE YOU, JUST LIKE MY MOM TAUGHT ME!"

"Okay, well, err, my tech isn't necessarily _better_ than what you're familiar with, it's just a starship-grade submillimeter to X-ray scanner compressed to a much more mobile platform," he visibly flinched at her growl, "If you promise not to shoot me I'll give you one too?"

Tali was trying to not freak out. It'd been a hell of day already.

"And, in my defense, you are now wearing a set of Colossus Mark Ten armor customized for you specifically by Kassa Fabrication. That suit can take a glancing blow from one of the old alliance Grizzly main guns and only go down to sixty percent shield strength. Somewhere around here there's a full container of spare parts for it too."

Colossus Mark Ten suits ran at the same basic cost of a brand new corvette-class military vessel from any of the big three races. It wasn't like she hadn't read the manual and wondered who made the most expensive mistake of their life.

"How in the hell did you afford this... this apology of yours? And for that matter why does everyone always cringe when they talk about what corporation you work for? Who the hell are you?"

Harry finally took his turn to blush.

"If I tell you do you promise to not shoot me?"

Tali had to pause for a moment and think. Less than a standard day ago this guy saved her from an ambush that more than likely would have cost her life. She could handle herself, but she wasn't delusional enough to think she could take three bounty hunters in a Spectre's pay, while alone, in a dark alley. Said guy allowed her to give the Citadel Council probably its first positive impression of any Quarian in almost a century. Then he, misguided as it was, assured that she was healthy and bought her an enviro suit that would probably still be top of the line when it got passed down to her grandchildren.

All told, they were probably even for the naked thing. But it was by a narrow margin.

She breathed deeply and let it out slowly. The new smells of her armor were strange but comforting.

How bad could it be?

"Sure."

"Okay, see when I left Earth, and this was like seventy-five or eighty years ago, I was on bad terms with the people I left behind. I wasn't exactly welcome back either. So in response to essentially losing my home world and everything I had, I decided to head to the nearest space station and get royally, amazingly, and murderously drunk. It was fun so I made a bit of a tradition of it. A few years after Humanity made first contact I go to re-live my tradition, and two days later when I came fully back to consciousness, I found myself completely broke but heavily invested in a brand new venture called Fornax. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time, though how I got a live comm link to Kahje I still don't understa-"

"YOU'RE A PARTNER IN THE GALAXY'S LARGEST PORN PRODUCER!"

He winced again, and Tali unconsciously began caressing her boot knife at the thought that a pornographer had medical grade scans of her.

From the wall behind the pair a speaker crackled to life, and at a low volume the voice of the ship's pilot issued forth.

"Did I hear that right boss, you're a partner in Fornax?"

Harry looked at the speaker with a strange expression on his face.

"How much of that did you hear, Joker?"

Without any detectable note of shame, the pilot responded, "I have a custom VI that monitors all open mics on the ship for the words 'naked', 'sex', 'porn', 'filthy sanchez', and 'coffee'. Now. You, Fornax, spill."

Tali pulled her head wrap down over her visor. Maybe if she couldn't see any of it, it would all go away?


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter 9**

* * *

 **Serpent Nebula, Widow System, Citadel Station, Traffic orbit around Citadel Station, SSV Normandy - 06.05.2183**

Harry stood at the helm of the ship, one man cast against the backdrop of the galaxy (map), his minions doing his bidding below, quietly and competently running the vessel around him. It may have been a modified Turian design, but he loved the hell out of it. Everything reminded him of that fourth or fifth Star Trek reboot, the one from the 2120s.

Then there was the version he co-produced via extranet in 2164 that netted his company more than a few million credits from the old die-hard fans, and the curiously large and relatively undiscovered Elcor fan base. They had a thing for Asari painted green, who knew green women were still going to be hot?

He shook his head and refocused. Raising his arm to point dramatically at the galaxy map, he channeled his inner Shatner and ordered in his strongest tone, "Joker, take us out!"

...

"Uh, boss?"

"Yes Joker?"

"Where exactly am I supposed to be taking us out to?"

"Shit."

Shepard face palmed from her console to the side of the map, and unseen to most of the bridge crew Joker laughed his ass off in the pilot seat.

Harry opened a channel to Garrus in the cargo bay, "Vakarian! Where the hell are we going?"

"Noveria! Now leave me alone, I'm calibrating!"

"Right, Joker you heard the man, let's go."

"Right away boss."

Jane considered resigning. The bridge crew was outright laughing, and she could already see this being the worst assignment she had ever been assigned. _Including_ the time the other N-school candidates found out she had never had alcohol before and told the instructors. They thought that wood grain was a good proof to start out with, and Jane spent two months blind before the med station could regrow the parts of her eyes and liver that died.

* * *

 **Horse Head Nebula, Pax System, High orbit over Noveria, SSV Normandy - 06.09.2183**

"SSV Normandy your arrival is unscheduled, our defense grid is armed and tracking you. State your business."

Joker rolled his eyes. Even if they weren't a registered Alliance military vessel, it was illegal for them to just shoot down any ship looking for port. Even on a corporate world.

"Noveria control, we hold a Council Spectre on Citadel business."

There was a noticeable pause. Harry would bet his wand Traffic Control contacted the Noveria head office, and they were trying to figure out if they could swing some kind of legal chicanery to stop him from landing.

Unfortunately for them, Vakarian had been kind enough to point out that no planetary corp would be pleased with a Spectre inspecting another, now formally disavowed, Spectre's holdings. Harry looked into it, and the only way they could attempt to legally bar a Spectre on legitimate council business from entry was if they went and declar-

"Noveria control to SSV Normandy, we cannot clear you for landing. There has been a complete loss of communications with a biological hot lab in our Peak Fifteen facility. We suspect a catastrophic containment failure and have declared a planetary quarantine at this time. We cannot allow anyone entry."

Harry sighed, yep, that.

Joker looked at him, eyebrows raised, and from Flight Lieutenant Moreau's other side Shepard mirrored the expression.

Harry shook his head, "Noveria Control, I think if you query Council records you'll find that the SSV Normandy is licensed and rated for operations and retrieval inside a biological hot zone."

"Stand by."

Joker muted the connection and looked up at Harry questioningly. Shepard again mirrored his expression.

"What? It's not like Citadel records on corporate and ship certifications are that hard to spoof, and the Alliance has weaker firewalls than them. Hell, Tali could do it in her sleep. I had a friend run the file changes last night for us after Garrus mentioned they'd try something. And that fancy new armor I bought for the ground crew is all rated for heavy combat in hot zones."

Neither of them looked away, or changed their expressions.

"What!?"

The speakers buzzed back to life, "Noveria control to SSV Normandy, we... confirm your ratings. Sending coordinates to docking facility now."

Harry reached past Joker and unmuted their side, "Hold on that, Noveria control. Is the Peak Fifteen facility registered to Binary Helix?"

The operator audibly sighed, "Confirmed, Normandy."

"Requesting coordinates directly to Peak Fifteen facility. We're all busy, no need to waste time."

"SSV Normandy, Noveria head office requests explicit verbal confirmation that you are aware of current penalties for corporate espionage, and that all research at Peak Fifteen is covered under said laws."

Harry just rolled his eyes, "Good god, man. I'm a Council Spectre. The paperwork would take days, but I could walk into your head office, send all of their files directly to their competitors, piss on and then burn all of their computers, and then shoot everyone in the building on my way out. Legally. Why don't you just send those coordinates our way and relay that message to Noveria head office."

"C-Confirmed, Normandy. Noveria Control out."

Joker just smiled widely and routed the ship toward the lab. Shepard contemplated weeping.

* * *

 **Horse Head Nebula, Pax System, Landfall on Noveria, Outside Peak Fifteen Research Facility - 06.09.2183**

As they closed with Peak fifteen, the Normandy began receiving emergency signals from the lab. The storm over that section of the planet blocked all non-hardline signals from bouncing off the satellite network over the planet to the head offices. When the Normandy got below the bulk of the storm the ride got bumpy, and the real information began rolling in. Omni tool emergency signals were activated across the facility, the only ones reporting living beings attached to them were centered around an area their beacons referred to as "Rift station".

The emergency retrieval package from the facility contained a full schematic that showed the Rift station being secured over a massive artificial cavern. In an emergency the whole section of the lab could be dropped into the cavern, but somewhere along the line the relevant protocols were suspended and the compromised facility stubbornly clung to the roof of the three kilometer crevasse. A lone emergency beacon in an isolated section of the lab also shared information on a 'neutron purge' protocol which had yet to be disabled.

Harry took the full ground crew down with him, a few discrete expansion charms and highly focused notice-me-nots kept anyone from questioning why four humans, a Quarian, a Turian, _and_ a Krogan could all fit inside a tank they came close to outweighing.

Since he left Earth, Harry got more use off notice-me-not charms than nearly any other piece of magic. It was probably the only reason why he hadn't actually seen that probing he had joked with Anderson about. As funny as it was, Harry got a small trill of fear going into a biological research facility.

At least he was locked out of this lab and not locked in.

Joker dropped the Mako on a forty meter wide stretch, just around the corner from the entrance to the lab. It was a tight target to hit, but Moreau assured them that he could make it. Confidence _had_ been adversely when rocket turrets of a very strange design (notably not on the retrieval plans) opened fire on the Normandy as it entered extreme range. Low powered rail shots quickly left craters in their place before the rocket fire could do more than leave soot on the Normandy's paint job.

The pilot's somewhat insane crooning to 'his baby' over 'what those mean little turrets did to you' followed the ground team as they moved to enter the facility.

They entered through the main cargo reception area. Who, or what, ever compromised the facility had done a decent job. The main doors were blocked by a ruined civilian-grade Grizzly, leaving both entrance and exit to the much smaller personnel entrance. At least they wouldn't have to fight any of the massive tank platforms they had seen on the way in.

Wrex led the charge through the airlock and into the bay proper, and as the inner door opened, Harry's eyes latched on to the one perfect moment where he stood silhouetted against the bay.

The Krogan's massive frame, two and a half meters and half a metric ton of armed fight, against the artfully arranged backdrop of Geth platforms. Two of the huge red ones from Eden Prime, and a pure as the driven snow white one that was half-again as tall.

So much for not having to fight any of the massive tank platforms.

* * *

 **Horse Head Nebula, Pax System, Peak Fifteen Lab Facility, Noveria - 06.09.2183**

The administration VI that coordinated the facility went by the name Vira, and was physically disconnected from any useful system control. For their purposes it was irrelevant though, because they had the daughter of a Quarian admiral with them.

Modern Quarian engineering augmented the legacy of a species that _accidentally_ invented intelligence with the ingenuity of three hundred years experience in jury-rigging, re-purposing, and the occasional stripping for parts. When Tali learned her trade, she did so by cracking security doors on ships of every description to escape minders from her dad and hang out with friends. As a teenager she helped with prepping and refining loads of omni-gel for civilian mechanics and re-fitters. Before she left on her pilgrimage she was one of those re-fitters.

If that skill weren't enough, Harry spent the few days' transit before planet fall whipping up a Potter Omni-tool Mark One. Military grade omni-tools in the modern age took the form of a centimeter thick forearm sheathe, which while a little bulky, covered enough volume to hold the mass effect field emitters that allowed their crazy miracle tech to work.

A Potter Mark one kept the profile of it's inferior cousins, but was _much_ larger on the inside than it was on the outside. This meant that not only could he double density of emitters in the most sophisticated model on the market, but the emitters he used were larger, stronger, and much easier to maintain. Separately expanded sections held power generation and a hugely increased processing capacity, both cooled with magic.

The group passed through the facility as if the doors weren't there. They avoided security consoles entirely, Tali just ripped power lines out of the walls next to the more ornery doors and provided completely local power and authority for all their needs. In less than ten minutes they were on the internal tram and knocking on the door to Rift station.

The farther they went through the lab, the more information they got on what they were going into. Good data security software is one thing, but effectively policing what people sent to friends and family over the extranet as well as what they write in their personal files, is quite another.

The most significant target in the overall C-Sec investigation was Asari Matriarch Benezia T'Soni, and she was in the building. She apparently showed up with a curious amount of baggage, and with a rather significant amount of personal bodyguards, both noted on many times by several different, now dead, lab support personnel.

An interesting pattern if nothing else.

Before they entered the building the primary objective had been to secure had been anything and everything on the servers in the labs. Per the retrieval plans, data back-ups were held in a specially secured room in an offshoot of the hot labs past Rift Station. When the landlines to the Noveria head office were cut, the landlines from the servers to the rest of Peak fifteen's computers had been similarly cut, so they had been pretty firmly resolved on going there.

With their new intel, that changed.

Saren had been an excellent field agent, and discounting that one spot of poor luck at the end of his life, that excellence had translated to all of his work. Despite days of data mining and correlation from every report he had ever submitted, they still hadn't gotten anywhere. Without breaking all of his encryption and verifying that what they _had_ broken weren't red herrings designed to be decrypted first, the best they could do is track location data from the Citadel network associated with his reports. All their conclusions were inferences based on un-falsifiable comm tracking, and wild guesses about the veracity of his old reports. It was hardly a stretch to think that a man that betrayed the Citadel Council _and_ the Hierarchy may have lied at some point.

Physical access to a co-conspirator was a game changer.

When the team finally breached Rift station, they were both amused and concerned by how the lab was laid out. Retrieval data and mapping stolen from omni-tools along the way showed that from the tram there were three routes: a door leading directly into the highest security research area, an elevator down into the main floor of the station, and a second elevator leading directly down to the hot labs.

Harry had a feeling. One of those tingling sensations in his balls that signaled one of three things. He was onto something big, he was about to get shot, or he had testicular cancer and needed to get checked out. Hoping it was one of the first two reasons, he made one of those decisions that he was probably going to regret.

"Err, Wrex and Shepard, with me. Something tells me the high security zone has something fun in it that we'll get to play with. Vakarian, Zorah, Williams, and Alenko, you all go straight for the servers. Don't stop for anything, collect survivors if you find them but that data is the target."

Alenko, who Harry had met only briefly on the ride to Noveria, was the one to raise issue.

"Shouldn't we stick together? We're good at what we do, but an Asari matriarch who has lived longer than the rest of us put together is a big target."

Harry waved him off, "If I were a millennial monogender with tentacles on my head working to overthrow a galactic civilization, I'd be in the secure lab facility. Wrex, Shepard and I are far more likely to find her than you are. If I'm wrong and you do find her first, I have it on _really_ good authority that after about six centuries life really dries out, so just talk to her and try to be interesting. She'll keep you alive for that if nothing else."

Harry collected the N7 and the Krogan in his wake, with a quick gesture he simply vanished the security door in his way and moved forward, "You kids will be fine, toodles!"

/-/

Harry's three man squad advanced down a long and mostly straight corridor. Behind them Tali'Zorah's gentle cursing in keelish sounded out against the bumps and hums of a normal facility.

The Krogan followed Harry and idly scratched at the edge of his crest where a human's left ear would be. He wondered if he would get to shoot another robot today, if the mess back on the Normandy would be serving 'enchiladas' again, and how the insane human could accurately describe the ennui of living past about six hundred years.

Lt. Commander Shepard was a lot more focused on how and why Harry had so distinct an opinion on what he would do if her were a thousand year old Asari bent on galactic instability and insurrection.

Harry was just genuinely curious why anyone would leave a direct path from their most secure lab to the tram station. He concluded that everyone was getting stupider over time, and that he was just lucky to have been born at the height of intellectualism in the year of our lord nineteen-hundred and eighty.

/-/

When the team finally got to the lab, Harry got to see the other end of the insanity of modern humanity. On the one hand, straight paths without manned or unmanned checkpoints from transit out to the most sensitive location. On the other, and isolation lab that was literally suspended over the rift that the whole station was named for.

The transition was seamless, barely any resonance from where the hall went from being attached to the bedrock to being one hundred and thirty explosive bolts from falling nearly three kilometers straight down.

A walkway connected to the hallway they entered from, and edged the room. At the center was an isolation tank that held some kind of chitinous crab monster, a small section of walkway connecting the tank to the ring around the edge, and supporting a dozen computers and esoteric monitoring instruments.

An Asari stood alone in the room apparently resting her head against the glass of the isolation tank, accompanied only by a small wind that whipped through the room, a ghost of the storm still roaring outside.

Harry understood virtually none of what he was seeing, but somehow it all felt rather familiar.

"Benezia?"

She started and looked wildly over at the three beings in the door.

Wrex smacked Harry for giving up the advantage. Shepard smacked him in the same place a second later.

"Hey! What the hell! No reason to not be civil about this!"

Benezia walked back from the tank to the edge, standing in front of the three armed intruders.

"Not the back-up, then."

"Not exactly."

Harry slapped Wrex's arm and indicated off to the left, he took the cue and began circling around.

"Who are you then?"

Harry smiled and stared directly into her eyes, "I'd give you my name, but honestly you haven't heard of me. Depending on who your friends are back on Thessia you might have heard of my work, but something tells me you're not much into roses."

Benezia smiled, "An earthling with an appreciation of gardening then. You know something of the power of creation. Of shaping life, turning it to happiness or despair."

"Your creature there?"

From across the room Harry caught a word from Wrex, a growl really.

"Rachni."

Shepard cursed from beside him, but Harry felt compelled only to raise his eyebrows.

"Resurrecting a dead race. Wow. I've done some stuff in my time, but bringing back the Rachni. I'm actually impressed."

Benezia seemed bemused, "Her children were to be ours. Raised to hunt and slay Saren's enemies."

Harry sucked in a breath from between his teeth, "Now that's a tricky prospect. I've seen it attempted before. Even when it works, never quite works out how you'd expect. Raising the child of your enemy."

Benezia inclined her shoulders just the slightest fraction, a very tiny and elegant shrug.

He continued, "And then your words there, Saren's enemies. Saren. Not these Reaper fellows?"

She twitched far less elegantly than she shrugged, it seemed. Harry just looked away.

"Motherfucker!"

Benezia was visibly taken aback, her biotics flaring around her tight to her skin, "Excuse me!"

Harry just leaned against the wall and slowly removed his wand from his gauntlet, twirling it in his fingers he made eye contact with Shepard, who looked completely out of her depth.

"It's not her!"

Shepard gave him a dead look before responding, "What do you mean it's not her?"

Harry waved his wand wildly as he threw his hands in the air, "She's a nobody, a patsy, silly bitch might as well be a puppet, we're almost not even talking to her!"

In front of both of them the purple swirls of the matriarch's biotic power grew wider and more powerful.

He gave her a glance, "You're a pawn, honey."

Lowering his gaze he continued, "God damn it. This shit is never fucking simple, is it?" Harry smacked the wall and stared into Shepard's eyes, "Do you know what I would give for an honest to god crime syndicate? Or just a conspiracy, it could even be a crazy human conspiracy, I don't care."

Shepard's expression did not change, "What do you mean it's not her?"

Harry looked away, "Something's running her like an engineer's repair drone. Sure, when she talks it's her words or whatever, but behind that she's empty over there. Nothing going on behind those eyes but some cheap wit and the will of something big and nasty."

Benezia's expression tightened and the swirling energy around her increased in density before concentrating in her palms. As Harry and Shepard spoke she drew an arm back, making as if to throw something, and-

And then the stock of Wrex's shotgun impacted on the back of her head just beneath where the spine met the skull.

Matriarch Benezia went out like a light.

The Krogan's gravelly voice added it's two cents, "What are we doin' about that thing?"

One of the massive dino-frogs three fingers indicated the huge bug that seemed to be staring at them. Some kind of terrifying tentacle waved weakly at them from inside the isolation tank.

"My answer to that question depends on your answer to two of mine."

"Alright, Punk."

"Is that the last one in existence?"

"Probably."

"Do they taste good?"

The tentacle stopped waving and the whole bug went absolutely rigid.

The Krogan smiled widely and wiggled a hand side to side, "Decent enough, better than Varren steak but not by much."

"Then we're probably gonna let it go."

The bug noticeably relaxed, which is saying something given that it was the last of a species that no one had ever spoken to, let alone analyzed the body language of.=, and survived the experience.

"You know my people's eventual extinction is down to those bugs, on top of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Krogan on worlds across the galaxy."

Harry leaned off the wall and began making his way to the tank, "In fairness Wrex, I'd really blame the Dalatrasses and the Primarch before I went with the Rachni, but that's just me."

Inside the iso-tank there was just barely enough room for the Rachni to turn and properly face them. It was no longer waving a tentacle at them. If Harry had to guess, it looked... expectant?

How in the hell could he even begin to guess that?

It was a _bug_.

He could barely tell when Salarians were hungry, and they were at least humanoid. He literally had a better chance of guessing galactic lotto numbers. Okay, not better, he had done exactly that a few times by accident, but there was a reason he stopped drinking and going on the extranet at the same time. Thank god for fake identities.

"Alright love, something tells me you're not part of the standard translation implant. All the same, you can understand us, can't you?"

A tentacle began waving up and down. Harry was going to guess yes.

"Cool. Now I know you guys can shoot acid, but since I'm generally on your side, no shooting me, yeah?"

More waving that Harry was _really_ hoping was a positive.

"Okay, I know how we can communicate easily, but I'm gonna need to cut a hole in this tank, so let's no one freak out."

Harry flash formed a blade out of omni gel, and speared the tank. With deliberate movements he began cutting a hole about half a meter in diameter, but before he could finish Shepard put a hand on his arms.

"Is this a good idea? These things almost conquered known space, we needed Wrex's people to turn the tide, and no offense Wrex-" "Some taken." "-but we all know how that worked out. Shouldn't we just blow the bolts on that container and be done with it? Isn't that the safe and responsible thing here?"

Harry looked at where her arm rested against his, "Maybe, but let me ask you something, you ever committed genocide before? Like have you ever killed the last of a species?"

"Never!"

"But you want me to do it? See here's the thing, in my… neighborhood, for lack of a better word, we had a lot of unique wildlife, so unique that total populations across the planet weren't even in the hundreds of thousands. The biggest and strongest apex predators we had numbered in the low thousands. Between four wars and more terrorists than I care to remember, I was present for three extinctions, and I caused one. I'm bloody well not gonna cause another unless this thing over here is a serious asshole."

In the tank next to them a tentacle knocked on the glass while two arms made a distinctly placating gesture.

Harry smiled widely, "Besides! I've never read an insects mind before, that Skeeter bitch notwithstanding, this will be fun!"

/-/

It was an old and terrible old joke, but it really was quite empty in the bug-thing's mind. As with nearly everything mental (and Harry once successfully used legilimency on a rock, so he considered himself something of an expert) it wasn't quite that simple. The empty space was massive, consuming, and aggressive. It was a blaring hole in in the bug's mental world where a lot of things should have been.

From nowhere (well, somewhere, but in a world literally defined by the mental whim of a being he had met fifteen minutes ago, Harry wasn't going to guess) a sound filled the air. The sound brought color, and texture. It brought smells and a taste too.

Kinda minty.

Suddenly the massive chitinous monster from the iso-tank was looming in front of him, and in defiance of everything he understood about bugs, the minty smell grew stronger.

"Hi!"

In response, wild tones resonated across the wide open space, the notes filling the world with color and granting it form. Grey formlessness became The Fiddler's Green became an opera house became the shitty apartment Harry lived in just before he gave the ICW the finger and left for space.

Harry wasn't the biggest music buff, but what he was hearing was damn beautiful and-

Was that Mary Had a Little Lamb?

Harry shook his head and stopped being distracted, "Alright, this isn't exactly the first time I've done a mind meld with an ancient and unknown intelligence, yeah? It's my third time, if I'm going to be honest."

Harry stared off into the distance for a moment before shaking his head and refocusing again.

"The point is, this is one of those Nietzsche 'if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee' things. I know you can read me to the same extent I'm reading whatever this is," Harry gestured idly at his surroundings, which were now a perfect representation of an early post-tribal period Elcor brothel, "So if you could just stick to English, I'd really appreciate it. That said, yours is my favorite hello I've ever come across in the _history_ of communication."

The surroundings settled on a large featureless white plane, and the bug thing in front of him looked oddly concerned for a moment before responding, "Your words are colorless, low, and limiting to us."

It paused, silence stretching into the bland white nothingness.

"We do not like this."

Harry just shook his head at the overwrought timing, "All the same, you can speak my language a _lot_ easier than I can attempt yours. I could try, but it'd all just come out in rock and roll and off-shades of silver. Also there's that whole I control your fate thing, so not to be a dick here, but it'd be nice if you could just do me a favor."

"We... see wisdom in your words."

Silence extended again between the man and the tank-like insectoid monster, this time absent the sense of melodrama. Harry could sense that she (it? Can a human understanding of dimorphic genders be accurately applied to bug people? Harry had deliberately stayed away from those websites on Earth's internet, so he didn't know enough to comment.) was building up a thought and translating it for him, so he was content to wait.

"We thank you for not silencing the song of the one with us here before you. Hers is a beautiful melody, but hers is also a small voice struggling against the sour yellow note. We think you will find a way to raise her voice, and you will benefit from it."

"I've met others whose voices have been hidden by similar, err, sour yellow notes. I will do my best."

"We thank you."

This time the thoughtful silence belonged to Harry.

"Who are you? Are you different than the others like you who fought the rest of the galaxy?"

Rachni had a multi-part, compound, squee-gee mouth. They also had a few too many strangely luminescent eyes, and communicated primarily telepathically, and so had no set body language. How the hell that kind of face could look introspective was beyond him, but it did. Mental things had to be taken with a certain degree of suspension of disbelief, and if there was one thing Harry had skill with, it was self-delusion.

"We are the last singer. The last Mother. We sing for those left behind by the bittersweet notes of time. Now though, our song is our own. When our Mother sang to us from before we left our shell, the song of all the Mothers was plucked and hummed from beneath an oily shadow. When we sang of war, our song was not our own, it wasn't our color, we were filtered through the will of another."

"Was it the same yellow note I fought on behalf of Benezia?"

"Not the same, no notes are ever the same, but the same instrument was plucked by the same player to make both."

"Can you tell me more? More about this player? Do you know anything else?"

"Once we would have been one among many, but now we are the last echo of the singing planet. There are no more listeners waiting for our lead and no more repeaters that we may query. Space is silent. We can only sing of what we have heard, and the songs sung to us before we left the shell are as dreams."

"Did your mothers sing anything about the source of the note, did any find a way to fight it?"

Again with the introspective bug eyes. Harry really preferred Tali's wringing hands or Garrus' annoying clicking flange, at least his mind was capable of grasping that.

"We can tell you much, but not enough. We hear songs from outside our time, songs like your Moon heard and sang, we can tell you of one of the last notes those that came before played, but we cannot say why. It is your mission to find these notes already. This we know. Our song may bolster yours, but without yours our song will surely fail."

"Hold on, my moon?"

"We see from your memories, your moon is named Luna."

Harry smiled. His moon _was_ named Luna.

That made the decision kind of easier. Invoking Luna was an easy way to his good side. She was the best of him.

"Okay, friend. I believe you. We need to work out the hows and whys, at least I'm authorized to act in the name of the Council. I don't suppose you know who I should sing to do my paperwork for me?"

/-/

Tali entered the isolation room, limping just a little, and was completely taken aback to see how everything was suspended above the rift. It was a pretty big sight for a person that grew up on a ship, a contained and empty space that registered in kilometers.

Of course the Human and the Krogan sitting on the ground playing cards made another interesting sight.

"Jane? Wrex? Are you playing poker, and why is Potter holding hands with a giant bug?"

The Krogan smile wickedly as he played what appeared to be a full house, cleaning Shepard out of... were they betting omni-gel units?

Whatever.

"Tali, say hello to the last Rachni in existence. Harry's evidently doing some kind of Asari mind meld with it to figure out if it's okay, or if it's gonna try to kill everyone again."

You could hear the poor Quarian's indignation even through the voice module, "And you're just sitting there playing poker while he does this?"

Insane pervert or not, Potter was captain and there were forms to be obeyed.

Wrex looked up from his gathered winnings, "We were worried for a while there, poked our guns in the hole he made," a thumb indicating where Harry was staring into the thing's eyes and holding some kind of slimy tentacle thing, "but after about half an hour where neither of them blinked or moved, we gave up."

Jane began dealing a new hand while Tali stood dumbstruck.

"You mean the rest of us fought off waves of... of Rachni! And a bunch of mercs, some Geth platforms, and a bunch of Asari commandos, we primed a neutron purge even! And you all have been sitting here playing poker while the captain does some kind of spiritual communion with a big bug!"

"Yep."

Jane popped the 'P' in a way that grated on every nerve Tali had, and a couple that her enviro suit simulated for her.

"And you Wrex, you're okay with that? I mean a Rachni?"

The much larger being snorted, "So far Punk's been on the level with everything he promised me. I got to shoot robots, I stomped a few Rachni, he bought me a nice set of armor, and we completed an outstanding contract, and for the first time in sixteen decades I've done all of the above completely legally. I'm willing to let him explain."

Tali suppressed the urge to harrumph. She'd done it before and the vocalizer just did _not_ put the sound out correctly, which only made her madder.

Thankfully before anyone could feel anything more than a mild temptation to shoot their squad mates, a mostly unwelcome voice barged into the conversation, "I'll have you know she's not just a big bug, she's also a huge fan of The Clash! Rachni love punk rock, who knew!"

Jane shuffled her hand and collected Wrex's cards, "Given that no one has ever spoken to one before now, no one."

"Pity, they're excellent conversationalists! Pro-tip: never ask a Rachni how something tastes. Bug taste buds are fucked up."

Harry casually stood and stretched, his back popping lightly. With a negligent wave of his wand at the cage, the queen slumped unnaturally where she stood, as if knocked out, before shrinking alongside its cage. As it grew smaller the explosive bolts broke from where they were connected, leaving the whole package floating.

Harry brought the cage over, now the size of a small fish tank, and folded it under an arm.

"C'mon, lads. We'll fire off the neutron purge to get rid of all of these nasty bugs running around here. We have all kinds of fun things to tell the council, and then all kinds of fun things to go search for and later set on fire!"

Wrex was blasé.

Jane was fantasizing about a glass of Skyllian whisky, and wondering if David Anderson knew he was damning her to alcoholism when he gave her this assignment.

Tali was struck speechless behind her faceplate, but in her defense organic acid had nearly melted through her right boot and she'd almost been shot three times that day.

Harry just headed out, singing under his breath, "A nuclear error but I have no fear, 'Cause London is drowning and I, I live by the river..."

* * *

 **Horse Head Nebula, Pax System, High orbit over Noveria, SSV Normandy – 06.09.2183**

"This is a joke, right? You're joking right now."

The Asari took a page from the Spectre's book, and called over an assistant to flash form her a chair. The assistant made her a tall stool so she could still comfortably be in the FTL comm unit's pick up, but still rest her head in her hands.

Harry smiled perhaps a bit too cheerily.

"What!? I made peace. Is peace not desirable? We gain a _very_ unique ally and source of technology and information. I mean nearly all of the tech they use to manipulate eezo has a biological component, how cool is that!"

Councilor Valern's eyes visibly brightened, and he forwarded a number of after action report from the Rachni war to Harry over the FTL link.

Sparatus spoke up, "What assurance can you offer that the Rachni war won't be repeated? How many generations until they overrun the galaxy?"

"You're asking a good question, but also the wrong question. In this case what you all should be concerning yourselves with is the mission you gave me. The question is how this is relevant to my investigation into Saren and Matriarch Benezia. In that arena, I have good news. They were working with the Geth to interrogate the queen, because they wanted something only she could give them," Harry looked into the distance and placed a finger to his chin, "But what, oh what, could a bug queen that has been alive in the galaxy for less than a decade have, that a Spectre and sentient machines don't?"

The councilors looked on, mostly with anticipation, they enjoyed a little showmanship apparently. Well Sparatus and Valern did. Tevos buried her face in her hands and sighed.

Refocusing on his captive audience, Harry began sending his own data, "Ready for this? Astrogation data. Everything else about the Rachni is in the public domain, or hopelessly out of date. Their tech, their DNA, their strategies, and even their standard battle doctrine. The only thing of theirs we don't have is their astrogation data, Valern will back me up here, the theory was that a queen led every fleet from deep inside a Rachni held world, and no queen was ever taken alive. Now! Raise your hand if you've recently made friends with a Rachni queen!"

Harry raised his hand proudly, and frowned when none of the others did.

Harry lowered his hand, "You're familiar with an Asari melding, yeah? You know how the joining of their nervous systems can allow the passage of information. It's well recorded, not admissible as court evidence, yada yada yada. No offense Tevos."

She looked offended, but Harry just decided to move on.

"I... melded... with the queen, and I learned a lot. They are sensitive to other's minds at an incredible level, far and away more than anything or anyone I've ever encountered before, but it leaves them open to manipulation through those same means. It's why they struck before. Give me some time, and I can protect her from that same manipulation. I'll set them up in an asteroid field, as long as you leave them alone, they'll leave you alone."

Tevos spoke again, having never looked up from her hands, "Thank you for your report, Spectre, keep us appraised.

[A/N]: Next on Getting Too Old For This: Harry romances a thresher maw, Benezia is de-programed, and accidental magic causes Joker to be possessed by a demon from the second circle of hell RESULTING IN NO CHANGE OF ANY KIND ON THE NORMANDY.


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter 10**

* * *

 **Exodus Cluster, Close orbit over Mass Relay, SSV Normandy – 06.09.2183**

Harry clapped his hands and rubbed them together, "Okay! So I have good news and bad news, what do you want first?"

His audience looked at one another in a confused manner. One was a three hundred fifty kilo bug, the other was an Asari matriarch, gagged and tied to a chair.

"Bad news then? Okay. You both have very similar problems, in that you are each vulnerable to mental control or are currently under a form of mental control. The good news you ask? Well, the good news is actually for other people, I lied, this one is going to be pretty much shit wall-to-wall."

As Harry paced in front of his new students (victims), the ground team slowly trickled into the bay behind him. Joker had warned everyone that Harry was up to something with their two guests, and it was generally agreed upon that watching Harry and a giant bug deprogram a brainwashed Asari matriarch would be, at minimum, very entertaining.

"What we're going to do fix the two of you is going to hurt. It's nasty, it's invasive, and if I ever caught someone doing it I would kill them. Unfortunately, it is also the only way for me to help both of you in the next four or so days before we hit Saren's little complex on Virmire."

As he paced Harry's brow furrowed and he seemed to look inward.

Taking his wand from the sheath on his wrist and giving it a wave and poke at their audience, he stopped pacing and moved to Benezia and the Rachni queen. With a flourish he conjured a seat for himself and sat, looking intently at the captive pair.

"The quickest way to teach your mind to defend itself against intrusion and influence sucks. It's how I was first taught. A man that hated me and hated my father was supposed to use this method to teach me, but instead of properly doing it he used the opportunity to make me relive all of my most shameful and painful memories at once. In the end I derived something useful from it, but…"

Harry shook his head to rid himself of those memories. Everyone involved was long dead. Eight pairs of eyes followed him, seven looked thoughtful and the eighth seemed very unsure.

"Resisting mental control," Harry nodded to the bug lady, "and rescuing yourself from mental control," a nod to the Asari, "both center around being able to recognize the difference between your thoughts and thoughts from an outside source. In order to do either one of these things you must know yourself. You must know, acknowledge, and understand everything about who you are, what makes you, you. When you have an ultimate and perfect pragmatic understanding of who you are, any foreign influence will stand out and can be easily ignored. Even if what you are is an irreverant, terminally cheeky, hedonistic, self-contradictory shit. Hell, the man who taught me was such a bastard because he knew exactly who he was, and exactly what he was doing to me, and he kept doing it because he was a cunt and he knew he was a cunt, and torturing children made him happy."

You could just tell how much Harry was over his own training.

"In _your_ mind your power is _absolute_ , but until you truly understand yourself it's trivial to use a little bit of power to trick you into believing you're something else, and from there it's a hop, skip, and jump to running you from the inside like a robot,"

"For the next four days we're gonna be here together, and we're going to delve into each of your memories. From the first time you saw your mother's face to the conversation we're having now. I'll guide you through feeling every single thing you have ever felt, it will be like it is all happening to you again, and it's probably going to be unpleasant. Looking back at your life, using you _now_ to take a long view of you _then_ , is unfortunately the fastest and most brutal way to figure out who you are."

Harry smiled tiredly at the pair, "Now who wants to go first?"

Benezia struggled against the cords holding her in her chair, prompting the Rachni queen to look in her direction. Hasty elbow movements seemed to indicate that Benezia was not eager to start, unfortunately for her the queen had no fetters and, was able to point a tentacle in her direction.

"Someone's been volunteered!"

/-/

On the other side of Harry's quick illusion ward, the collected ground team was all really unsure what was going on. Potter mentions his plan is going to hurt, and then... this?

No one spoke for twenty straight minutes, not even Joker, which was surprising given that Tali's alerts on the recording equipment in the cargo bay activated several times, indicating he was aware of what was going on.

At the end of the first hour, Wrex and Jane made use of Harry's card synthesis program again, flash forming a deck and getting into a game of Skyllian Five. Garrus, Tali, and Kaiden wanted to join in, but couldn't bring themselves to look away from their captain.

When the game picked up and Jane began cursing her luck, Kaiden was finally moved to comment, "Has he actually been teaching a Rachni to juggle for the last hour and a half?"

Garrus grunted and said, "Well it's got the six... arms?"

"Can't be easy, can it?" Kaiden agreed.

Tali just sighed.

* * *

 **Hades Gamma cluster, Antaeus system, Static discharge orbit over Ageko, SSV Normandy – 06.10.2183**

Harry leaned back in his chair, breaking eye contact again with Benezia, who still sat in front of him. They'd only had about sixteen hours' worth of sessions total, and it was nearing the end of the shipboard 'day'. A bit of a blush burned on his face and, for at least a moment, Harry couldn't bring himself to make eye contact with his captive.

In her seat across from him, Benezia looked very hot under her exotic space collar. She shifted in her seat constantly and seemed very annoyed that whatever memory they had been viewing ended so quickly.

"I... err... wow."

Benezia seemed to agree from behind her bindings and gag. All of which only made Harry blush a little harder given what he had just seen.

"Given a real choice, I would never force you to do this. I hope you realize it. If you could do this on your own, I would work a little of my voodoo to get you extra time and just leave you to it, but this is the only way we can get you free."

The matriarch seemed to hear his words, and use them as focus to calm down. Her shifting noticeably stopped and the way her eyes sought his moved from frenzied to contemplative.

"You're starting to see it, aren't you? It's always there, just at the edge of your vision. We'll, err, dive back in, in a second, but try and concentrate on how it changes your memory where it touches it, alright?"

Harry had brought Benezia to a point where she probably didn't need to be gagged anymore, she was almost in control of herself, but if he was going to be honest with himself, He did _not_ want her commentary on what they were seeing.

"I feel obligated to say, you have amazing taste in women."

Benezia blushed very slightly, and lightly nodded her agreement.

" _Legillimens_."

...

From beside the pair, the Rachni queen appeared rather introspective. The waves of desire, shame, and lust she was getting off the other two did not translate well into an insectoid context.

She felt a little left out.

/-/

Garrus and Kaiden were again parked on the other side of Harry's illusion ward. Almost everyone else had given up on the spectacle, but neither could quite bring themselves to. Garrus hadn't calibrated the slightest thing in over a day, which alone spoke of how deep his curiosity ran.

Kaiden broke the silence that had reigned for over an hour, "I was surprised when Harry could do seven balls, but the Rachni doing seven knives?"

"Kinda blows Potter out of the water."

Kaiden hummed his agreement.

After another long moment Garrus spoke up, "Should we be worried that he's _activating_ those grenades?"

"Eh."

* * *

 **Attican Beta cluster, Hercules system, Static discharge orbit over Zatorus, SSV Normandy – 06.12.2183**

Benezia perched gracefully on a very alien looking seat across from Harry, her ankles artfully crossed across a base made of weird curves and non-Newtonian angles. At his other side the Rachni queen laid on an even more alien looking couch. In fairness, they _were_ aliens so it made at least a bit of sense, but Harry couldn't help but feel they were each showing off.

The trio was deep within the recesses of Harry's mind, as that was probably the only place any being could talk to a Rachni and not have to suffer the indignity of possession. Benezia and the queen were both discussing the finer points of how biological variance lead to philosophical differences between species.

Collectivism versus individualism, the existence of 'telepathy' as a defining feature of a species' development. All kinds of complicated and annoying things like that. Smart people bullshit.

Harry was not involved.

Minutes of real time before, Harry finished his work with the Rachni queen, managing to teach her a bare-bones version of occlumency that would safeguard her in the future from this infamous 'sour yellow note'. Something Harry could now recognize as a defining tactical precept of the Reapers.

Overall, teaching the Rachni's still young mind to defend itself from intrusion was a simple task and held only a few surprises. Benezia, on the other hand, had been a gold mine of information. She had revealed the details of the Asari-cuttlefish dreadnought, Sovereign, and when she did so Harry could feel the source of the control from her memories. Thankfully it wasn't infectious, it couldn't get to him through her, but it was on par with a full-fledged dark lord's _imperius_. An _imperius_ accomplished via technology, and on a scale so wide it almost qualified as geographic.

Spooky.

Sovereign hadn't exactly been subtle about passing it around either. Following her own brainwashing Benezia had personally witnessed hundreds of her supporters fall under the big machine's spell, hardened Asari commandos the least among them. Saren's contacts had brought on even greater numbers of Turians, and as time went on and his methods fell further below the legal execution of his duty, Vorcha, Batarians, and Krogan.

The only upside was how free Sovereign had been with its plans.

Literally the only upside.

Harry was not looking forward to having to convince the Citadel Council that the bloody great space station they named themselves after was actually a giant Mass Relay intended to receive transit from dark space, or that the only reason they weren't already dead was a species of double-brainwashed suicidal bug people. Maybe he would have better luck working the conduit angle? The conduit's receiving end needed to be moved, immediately, and to the center of a sun. That should be an easier sell, in theory anyway. Moving the galactic economy to a war footing wouldn't hurt in the long run, intense research into the final days of the Protheans was a good idea, and every single Geth runtime in existence needed to be deleted.

Of course then the real work started. They needed a survey fleet needed to be sent to every single system the Rachni knew of and they didn't, and they needed all of that surveying done _yesterday_. Soverign already knew where it was going, and just to get to even ground with the over-opinionated photo-copier the Citadel was going to have to put together the single greatest survey effort of the modern era.

On top of everything, as a neat backdrop to the galaxy-spanning conflict they were courting, Harry had to convince the Citadel to scour the galaxy for more of this Reaper tech, and to blast, burn, dissolve, and vaporize it wherever it was found.

Harry didn't mind being the bearer of bad news, Merlin only knew how much experience he had with it, but doom on a scale above planetary wasn't something he was used to yet.

At the moment however, Harry James Potter was not bothered.

In fact, Harry interrupted the conversation between the two aliens in front of him to voice the only real concern he did have, a remnant of the time he spent in the Queen's mind.

With tears in his eyes, he said, "I've never been aroused by opera before. Wow."

The two others looked at Harry, entirely deadpan. Harry continued to stare off into the distance, trying to figure out if being the most turned on he had ever been in his life by a bug queen's opera meant something, and the two quickly returned to their conversation.

* * *

[A/N]: Next time on Getting Too Old For This: The crew assaults Virmire from inside a trash can, Wrex attempts to mate with a pod crab (killing it in the process), and it's revealed that the Reapers are huge fans of H.P. Lovecraft.


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter 11**

* * *

 **Sentry Omega cluster, Hoc system, close proximity of Relay, SSV Normandy – 06.12.2183**

The Normandy left the mass free corridor projected by the relay in the Attican Beta cluster with its characteristic blue 'optical boom'. As the world around them left 'Einstein's Nightmare' physics and bled back into 'Teenager's Nightmare' physics, Harry stood beside Shepard in the CIC staring at the positional data trickling into the holo-tank at the center of the bridge.

Well, staring at one number anyway.

Joker had worked his own personal brand of magic to drop them inside a thousand kilometers of their target, and when those three digits popped onto screen, Harry crowed in delight.

"Hah! 'Don't feed the addict', you said. 'It's only going to distract him', you said."

Gritting her teeth so hard it actually hurt, Shepard slapped a credit chit into the Spectre's hand, and stomped off to the furthest tactical station away from the cackling bastard.

Harry triumphantly highlighted the jump position on the display, alongside the last few jumps, and ran the math that proved Joker's average displacements had dropped by 30%. Around him the limits of the bridge crew's professionalism were sorely tested, but they managed to remain strong in the face of idiocy. Harry was left laughing and pointing to a silent crowd, all due to a lifetime's platinum-premium pass to a certain corporation's products, gifted to a certain Flight Lieutenant.

As the distraction passed, the frigate's sensor suite kicked into high gear. Millions of credits and years of research and development showed the bridge crew every visible thermal, electronic, and gravimetric reading inside the local heliopause.

Oh the things they saw.

For what should have been an empty planet in a politically unstable sector, not only was there a lot of traffic in Orbit, but also an impressive amount of debris. Standard equatorial orbits were crowded with blasted shuttle parts, and most of the LaGrange points in the system were similarly crowded with well-destroyed sensor arrays.

Something had entered the system hot, and with few reservations about the use of force.

Benezia had been both peeved and relieved to be freed from Sovereign's mental control, so in the end (after swearing vengeance against Harry for his transgressions) she had been happy to share the details she had on the facility.

It wasn't looking great.

Virmire was a biological research lab focused on developing a cure for the Krogan genophage, and lately to the study of what Benezia _now_ understood to be the reaper's mind control.

Saren, apparently, was in possession of a much clearer picture of his cause than what he had relayed to his followers. The more Harry learned about the guy, the more glad he was that he incinerated first and never stopped to ask questions.

In any case, the labs had security designed by thinking-machine-super-computers on top of what was easily the largest single concentration of Krogan off Tuchanka. It _would_ have been a very tough nut to crack, had a very familiar shape not been literally striding across it.

Visual and gravimetric data from the target indicated both a sky full of anti-aircraft fire, and a dreadnought shaped like an Asari dreadnought had gone and done the nasty with a cephalopod.

Sovereign was here, and it was raining fire down on the facility and nearly all the surrounding territory like a gaunt figure astride a pale horse. They had expected a lot of things, but this one was kind of a surprise, also the whole death thing was really Harry's shtick.

The Normandy began running silent as soon as it's thermal buffers cleared, passing into the system proper on a long elliptical arc that kept it out of Sovereign's line-of-sight as much as possible. The analysts began properly pouring over their data, which was further refined, and then displayed in the massive holo-tank where the galaxy map usually lay. Shepard was crouched next to the tactical display she had retreated to, now deep in discussion with the tech there, and Harry was back in his Shatner pose above the map, staring down at it thoughtfully.

At least that was what it looked like.

Harry loved a bit of showmanship, but was at his core a very lazy man. He was actually disillusioned and perched on a stool, sipping a smoothie. It helped him think, but the crew _did_ deserve the effort he was too lazy to physically provide.

Harry/Shatner pressed a stud in the Panel in front of him, opening a line to the cockpit, "Joker, keep us as quiet as you can and bring us into a high orbit over the planet, well away from the spaceship the size of a building if you please."

There was a second of silence before the regular vibrations of the ship changed slightly, and a tight voice returned over the comm, "On it boss."

The illusory Harry paused, his finger just above another stud on the panel, "Keep an eye out everyone, anything big explodes or anything significant changes, alert me," he pressed his button, "Ground team to comm room, ground team to comm room."

Real Harry stood, vanishing the remains of his smoothie and his stool, before the fake one moved to mesh perfectly with him in how he stood. Harry canceled his illusion and made himself visible, leaving the universe with only a single insane master of death. Whistling a jaunty tune, he made his way to meet his crew.

Ashley and Benezia were already in the circular room, standing before the large holo-display at the end of the room and speaking in hushed tones. On-screen in front of them were every picture and video they had of Sovereign. The aged Asari had been on board a handful of times, and appeared to be discussing tactical weaknesses of the dreadnought. such as they were. Harry just took a seat and watched two beautiful and intelligent women discuss military action like the dirty old man he was. Two hundred years taught him to both take all the time for himself that he could in a time of war, and that anything was a sexual euphemism if one tried hard enough. Explosive breaching at the airlock indeed.

Richard 'Leroy' Jenkins, Kaiden Alenko, Tali'Zorah nar Rayya, Garrus Vakarian, Urdnot Wrex, and eventually one Jane Shepard all slowly filtered into the room. When they were all seated Harry started in with his usual aplomb.

"I've got good news and bad news. Who wants what first?"

Benezia twitched at the phrase and Harry suppressed a grin. Total Potter exposure for the crew was currently at ten days, so they had grown to expect oddities but were still confused by his briefing style.

Silence reigned.

"Okay then! Good news first, thanks to our new friend in blue over here," Benezia inclined her head, "we have the full layout of the lab complex, and while we don't know exactly what defenses the Geth have embedded after the fact, Benezia did manage to get us access to the logistic records the Geth left from their procurement, so we can take some excellent guesses. Also my guess is that at least some of you heard on the way in, but in case you did not, the massive ship we encountered briefly on Eden Prime is also here, and is in the process of razing the base."

Harry smiled.

"In case there is confusion, that was the good news."

Ashley looked like she wanted to interject something, even going as far as leaning forward, before evidently remembering who was giving the briefing and thinking better of it.

"The bad news is a lot more fun. That ship out there stomping around is a Reaper. It's a single Reaper, a single omnicidal AI inside the shell of a ship the entire galactic community together would be hard pressed to replicate. It seems intent on burning down the buildings and hoping we can't get any kind of intel from it, so we probably need to get down there and figure out anything and everything we can as fast as we can.

"Right underneath it. You know, where it's safe."

Ashley looked vindicated for a moment (she knew the other boot was going to drop!), but then she realized what it was she was about to do and somehow the feeling of satisfaction vanished. In her stead Tali seemed to be the one with the question.

"If that is a facility that belonged to it, why is this reaper fighting its own people down there? Why wouldn't the Geth and Krogan just board it and move on?"

Harry looked to Wrex and his smile slackened somewhat, "That's actually part two of the bad news. The reason why that facility isn't already just dust is the fact that there is something in the neighborhood of fifteen hundred Krogan down there, sitting on top of what Saren's files claim is a cure for the genophage."

The Krogan sat bolt upright.

"A cure? For the genophage?"

"Indeed, my blood thirsty friend. Before you get all excited, I want you to think this through. This is a cure devised by a Turian extremist, and let be honest for a moment here, a Turian megalomaniac, who was attempting to get all sentient life in the galaxy harvested by agents of the big-ass ship down there. It might be a cure, but do you think for a second that it doesn't have a hidden kill switch or some kind of terrifying mind control built into it?"

Wrex's eyes moved back and forth rapidly, his hands clutching at nothing and his breathing audibly getting faster. It took a lot for an apex predator to look like a rabbit being circled by a hawk, and it wasn't a pretty sight.

Everyone in the room watched as the Krogan battlemaster attempted to deal with what was clearly a huge emotional trauma, and of them only Harry and Benezia weren't wishing the ship had a more relaxed policy regarding guns leaving the armory.

After a moment Wrex looked back at Harry, "We're getting it."

Harry scoffed, "Of course we are! What, you think I like genocide? I just want you to be aware that we aren't using it for a long time, and we're dropping a nuclear device in the base to kill everything that has had it used on them."

Wrex grunted, which doesn't sound like a lot, but he had something like a thousand years to learn how to fill a grunt with malice and the promise of violence, so it was a hell of a noise.

"Oh keep your quad on, you big baby. Think about it! You want a bunch of Saren-controlled Krogan running around the galaxy inspiring the council to their _next_ act of genocide?"

Wrex grunted again after a moment, this time with a bit more humor injected into it, and said, "I'm going to shoot you, you know that right?"

Harry stood and clapped his hands, "Absolutely, you can kill me when we get back."

/-/

The ground crew armored, armed, and loaded up in the Mako, each waiting only for their illustrious leader. Except in the case of the ground crew's newest, oldest, and most Asari member, who had seen the sensor readings alongside Shepard and knew Potter had to have a better plan than a standard sub-orbital drop. Unless they dropped on the other side of the planet, they weren't getting inside a hundred kilometers of the facility without doing so as an interesting multi-colored paste.

After a moment both the group and the individual got what they were looking for. Harry stuck his head in the hatch of the tank and with an exasperate tone asked, "What the hell are you all doing in there? I expected better of you, Jane, and Tali! Did none of you look at what's waiting for us down there?"

Tali and Jane both felt chastised for reasons they didn't understand, and moved with the group back out.

When they were all out in front of the tank again Harry stood in front of them and with a disappointed look began speaking, "Not only is there enough anti-air to knock a dreadnought out of the sky, but there is that whole Reaper standing on the facility thing to consider. I'm surprised at you all!"

Benezia looked silently at Harry expressing both a desire to be done with the lesson for the children and her belief in the fact that he had an answer for their dilemma, the assembled humans and Quarian all looked suitably abashed.

Garrus couldn't stand being upbraided like a boy forgetting the safety on his first gun, "What about Wrex!? Shouldn't he have known better!"

Harry injected even more disappointment into his expression and looked to the Turian, "Silly Garrus, Wrex is a Krogan. He knows, he just doesn't care, and when you grow a secondary nervous system to replace the one you've lost getting shot, you can afford to not care too."

Harry just shook his head and looked at the object of the discussion, "Kids these days..."

The Krogan seemed to agree, with a quiet, "Heh."

"Alright, you've all seen some of that voodoo that I do up to now, but now you get introduced to one of the more fun aspects of it. I'm going to say to you all now the four words that terrorized me all through primary school," Harry smiled widely, "Wanna feel something weird?"

With the wand he had been concealing behind his back, Harry mass transfigured each squad member into a sealed tin of potted meat. A swish and flick saw the squad rise into the air and file neatly into their improvised atmospheric re-entry vehicle. It stood just under a meter tall, was a forbidding black, and-

It was a trash can. A heavily charmed trashcan, but nonetheless a trashcan.

Harry picked it up and held it under and arm as he made his way through the ship to the airlock, whistling the tune to 'If I Only Had a Brain'. He got a few strange looks as he went through the CIC, but the command crew had all been briefed extensively by former-captain Anderson to just ignore anything they saw Harry doing that did not immediately endanger the structural integrity of the ship. They chose to let it go.

When he reached the cockpit, he stopped at Joker's seat, "Hey, so I need you to point the airlock onto a ballistic course with the facility, and just cycle it for me. When we're off ship it's you and Pressly in charge, so just keep her afloat, yeah? That Reaper's ECM makes it impossible for us to actually communicate, so just keep your eyes open and keep this on or near you."

Harry Pulled a massive conch shell from a pocket that was _way_ too small to actually hold it, and set it on the edge of the pilot's console. It was comically proportioned, like someone had glued an old school phonograph to a softball, but it rested easily on the edge of the holo-emitter's plastic shell.

Joker looked from the shell to the earnest face of his CO, and then back. Harry had done a lot of strange things, but he had also bought him porn, so overall Jeff was willing to give him a pass until he could explain himself more fully. Sure, they were in a combat situation, and there was a decent chance that he would die, but damn, it had been a _lot_ of porn.

"Whatever you need, boss."

"Good man!"

Harry continued whistling and went into the airlock. The vibrations of the ship's hull changed pitch and frequency gently over the next minute, indicating to Harry that Joker was performing his requested course corrections. After a moment Moreau's familiar voice broke in over the speakers in the airlock.

"You want me to cycle it now? Wait, did you even have a helmet earlier?"

Harry shook his head, they always caught the details after the fact.

"Just cycle it, and Remember Lieutenant, keep that shell on you."

"Whatever you say, Boss."

The outdoor to the airlock opened quickly, shooting Harry and the trashcan he was hugging out into the void.

* * *

 **Sentry Omega cluster, Hoc system, surface of planet Virmire – 06.12.2183**

Jane Shepard was on her hands and knees emptying her body of every meal she had ever eaten or would ever eat, while Jenkins stared off blankly into space and hugged his armored knees to his chest. Kaiden was the first to really recover, and actually punched Harry in the face, only to audibly break his knuckles on the plating of the helmet that appeared the instant before he could make contact.

The biotic clutched his fist to his chest and shouted, "FUCK! Never do that again!" the cry of frustration seemed to drain the tension out of him, as he quieted and looked down at his fist, "...and you broke my hand."

Harry just tssked, letting his helmet fade away again. He grabbed Kaiden's hand from him and with a wave of his wand audibly knit the shattered bones. No one was comfortable with any of the bone related noises, even the Krogan wincing at the sound.

"I told you guys it would feel weird. It's like no one listens to me."

Garrus stared down at his claws and said with conviction, "I will never eat meat again."

When the group was more or less whole, at a physical level at least, he hoped, Harry began walking toward the sound of gunfire and the massive dreadnought that filled the skyline, "Bunch of babies, like they've never been temporarily Spam before."

/-/

Harry and the trashcan full of his armed friends impacted on the outskirts of the facility, surprisingly only about five hundred meters from the garage/receiving area at the west edge of the base. Joker's careful aim landing them on the opposite side of the facility from the rampaging reaper.

The route into the base was lightly defended by sets of the smaller Geth platforms. It made for a gentle re-introduction to combat for the crew, who all seemed to still be freaked out by their temporary transformations.

All of the ground leading into the base was man accessible at best, being as it was frequently knee deep in seawater and limited by massive rock formations. Harry figured it had to have been mostly supplied by air, especially given the drone landing platforms that they skirted to the north. It looked like Saren was thinking more about how his top of the line genetic engineering facility would look, and less about whether or not it would need new foundations inside of five years.

Harry found himself thinking derisively about 'kids these days' for the second time in as many hours.

The team breached and cleared the garage quickly, entering the facility proper. Garage led to warehouse, warehouse led to maintenance bay, and maintenance bay to the security offices of the base. From there the team had quick access to the lab facility and the hard-wired defense functions of the base.

Sensors showed almost every available Geth platform and nearly every foot-mobile Krogan on the extreme east of the base, all fighting underneath the reaper ship which was delivering starship-grade fire support from a very up close and personal perspective. The rebellion of Saren's Krogan (there was a joke in there, but Wrex had already threatened to shoot Harry so he wasn't going to try his luck) against their machine overlord provided the perfect distraction for the team to sneak inside the base, and they took full advantage of it.

Harry would have felt bad if he weren't also there to murder every one of them, the plans for which he was still in the process of developing. Well, the escape plans. It wasn't the blowing up that was complicated, it was surviving it that was tricky.

The labs contained an impressive amount of genetic sequencing machinery, alongside a truly disturbing number of vivisected Krogan bodies. Whoever was running the tests had put subjects on ice in what looked like the middle of being dissected, which was horrifying on a level Harry hadn't seen since his time in the Aurors. The team could each now reliably say they knew what the inside of a Krogan womb looked like, which was pretty fucked by anyone's standards.

Saren's contracts for his scientific personnel could have used much more stringent morality clauses, but in the end Harry supposed it did kind of come with the 'mad science' territory.

He winced and shivered.

Throughout the lab Wrex went immediately to the consoles, his rage over the bodies and enthusiasm for the data in the lab's systems overwhelming both his focus on the fight against lab personnel, and his awareness of just how unqualified he was in the technical sphere. His omni-tool was just a step above civilian grade, and the Geth had already come through on Sovereign's orders to delete what they could of the data which left him in the lurch.

He had two saving graces, however.

First, the Krogan on site had insisted on solid state back-ups instead of the galactic standard optical storage discs, so when the Geth came through to wipe data their efforts were less effective, even physically destructive methods.

Second, Tali'Zorah nar Rayya was behind him, chuckling at his efforts, and in an attempt to ward off the gruesome sights in the lab. While the rest of the team shot scientists and partially dissected Krogan husks, she used her Potter Mark I to scan, defragment, and reconstruct nearly every bit of 'lost' data. Wrex and Harry were each forwarded what she got, before she ejected and destroyed the temporary OSD storage she held the data on.

The Krogan got a copy because she didn't want to get shot, Harry got a copy because he was the captain, and she made sure she did not have a copy because, well, she didn't want to get shot. Data even _hinting_ at a cure to the Genophage seemed like a great way to find one's self on the wrong end of a STG firing squad regardless of Spectre status, and that was a problem for captains and Krogan, not engineers.

By the time the squad had been planetside for two hours they collectively added ninety seven Geth platforms and seventeen Krogan to their Kill Count, and they uncovered what a talented genetic biologist could turn into a cure for the genophage, given a few years anyway. Beyond the genophage cure Tali was able to pull terabytes of additional encrypted data that would require later analysis. Harry could only speculate on what else they were getting, but any more information on what Saren had done in preparation of the coming reaper invasion would help.

Overall, that left the ground crew in the enviable position of having accomplished all of their objectives save one: total destruction of the facility and everyone in it.

The team holed up in the lab building closest to the center of the facility, but still outside the skirmish lines of the Geth and Krogan. The reaper was firing some kind of cannon that left huge volumes of what appeared to be a liquid slurry of tungsten and uranium, which made it both an appalling weapon, and an excellent way to block off hallways. The rapidly cooling metal blocked off huge sections of the facility, where it hadn't simply ripped through the building's superstructure, effectively isolating the Normandy-s ground contingent from the fighting.

Garrus set up a small perimeter with Kaiden, Jenkins, Williams, and Tali, while the rest of the team huddled around Harry whose plan they had not yet been briefed on. It didn't bear mentioning that they weren't thrilled when he let them in on it.

Shepard, as Harry's designated handler, was given first dibs on expressing her discontent.

"I'm sorry, you want to what?"

Harry paused for a moment in his work, and lovingly patted the casing of the bomb he was assembling, "WE," he said with emphasis, "are going to detonate a roughly hundred megaton bomb, easily clearing the base and hopefully hurting the reaper," his expression clouded for a moment as he looked back into the exposed interior where his omni tool was still hard at work flash forming components, "not too sure on the reaper though..."

Wrex was stuck in a short loop of looking from Harry, to his omni-tool, laughing a bit, and then repeating. He would be no help.

Benezia looked as if she wanted to protest, and Tali looked like she was doubting herself as much as she was her captain.

Shepard inclined her head to the Asari, a gesture which artfully combined a plea for help and recognition of her turn to try and stem the madness.

"One is almost _forced_ to ask, do you intend for us to die alongside the Geth and Krogan here? Unless you have a shuttle hidden in your pockets somewhere, or some means of ensuring the Normandy is not shot out of the air by the Reaper you so casually mentioned, it seems we are rather short of transportation at the moment."

Harry waved her off with a hand still holding a screwdriver, "I've survived nuclear explosions before, I'll survive them again, we don't have to worry about that."

As much as the casual dismissal of the explosive force of one hundred million tons of TNT was interesting, the three women were somehow not comforted. Tali took her turn at the wheel.

"I'm not a politician, but isn't there some kind of ban on fission weapons being used on garden worlds?"

Harry's voice echoed hollowly from the inside of the device, "Eh, sort of. I'm a Spectre though, so it's not like we can't get away with it."

The ladies seemed more troubled than they were before they voiced their objections as harry continued, "Virmire here may be a garden world, but we're fairly deep in the Traverse. No one develops out here so at worst I'll get a slap on the wrist, especially since we're," Harry's use of air quotes for his audience while his head was buried inside a bomb made less sense than his message, " 'Destroying a cure for the genophage'."

Wrex's attention finally caught on the conversation, his contribution more threat than statement, "But we're not."

Harry looked back up from his work, "Of course we're not! But for the love of god, no one can say anything even remotely like that or we're in deeper shit than I can reliably pull us out of. The genophage is an extinction level event for the Krogan, and anyone that says otherwise is an idiot. I can't let that stand. That said," Harry leaned on his device and pointed his screwdriver at the Krogan, "you and I are going to have a talk about some hows and whys of its use."

Wrex looked at Harry with murder in his eyes, before realizing that the object of his rage was casually supporting himself on the casing of a nuclear device he assembled in less than thirty minutes. He grunted and nodded his head once.

"Good. Now get everyone in here and we'll start this show."

Harry directed his only mildly terrified crew to all stand next to each other inside a circle he used his omni-tool to laser etch into the ceramacrete floor. Arcane looking symbols that none of the collected fighters could identify quickly lined the circle, forming a half-meter thick layer of cuneiform and curving pictograms.

Harry made a much smaller version surrounding his bomb, before stepping inside the circle next to his crew and chanting in old earth Gaelic. As the chant finished a dome of pulsing pink energy flowed up from the edges of the circle, enclosing the crew, who each looked askance at one another and their fearless leader.

Harry was blind to their apprehension, instead removing a small conch shell from a pocket on his thigh and in a move that confused everyone around him, holding it to his ear and calling out, "Joker, do you read?"

Jane caught the eyes of the rest of the human contingent as well as Garrus, and using deliberate eye and hand movements attempted to communicate a rising desire to mutiny against the clearly insane person responsible for leading them.

Jenkins, Alenko, and Vakarian were all instantly on board, each turning to confront Williams, when a tinny voice issued forth from the sea shell in Harry's hand.

"Umm, I read you boss. Do... do I just talk into the hole, or...?"

"Just listen Joker, we're about to light the bomb off on our position, when the reaper leaves the planet's surface and goes for the relay, I need you to get into a geosynch orbit directly over top of us and pressurize the airlock. Just say something when you get there."

The four prospective mutineers suspended their efforts for a moment to look at the shell in Harry's hand as though it were radioactive, speaking of which...

Harry turned to the others in the dome, each just inside the other's comfort zones as they tried to squeeze away from the pulsing pink walls they didn't understand, with a smile he pulled out the detonator causing six sets of eyes to widen and the seventh to close in a resigned manner.

"A wise man once said that one should not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger. Now I don't know about subtle, but-"

In an instant the dome of energy around them went white, a roar that resonated in each of their bones seemed to come from every direction at once, the weight of the sound pressing in on each of them uncomfortably. In the same moment it was as though someone had lit a flame beneath each of them, all of their armor systems registering a massive radiation spike across the spectrum from infrared to gamma and exotic particle. Nothing registered as lethal or even threatening, but alarms still blared as the background levels of radiation that had been there before tripled and quadrupled for just a second.

"-I can do quick to anger."

* * *

[A/N]: Next time on getting too Old for This: Wrex shoots Harry in the face, the crew of the Normandy can no longer deal with their suspension of disbelief, and the Rachni queen discovers nude photos of herself on the extranet.


	12. Chapter 12

**Chapter 13**

* * *

 **Sentry Omega cluster, Hoc system, close proximity of Relay, SSV Normandy – 06.12.2183**

"So I imagine you have some questions."

Thirty-nine pairs of eyes locked onto Harry's, more or less answering the question without actually responding. Which was fine with him.

When it came down to it, Harry really preferred to monologue. It was a weakness he acknowledged, but in fairness all of the most powerful examples he had growing up loved their monologuing, between Dumbledore, Voldemort, and Sir Patrick Stewart. Really he was just a product of his environment.

Harry clapped his hands and began pacing in front of the crew of the Normandy, minus Joker who insisted on remaining at his post for some reason, silly people observing their silly responsibilities.

"I could stand here and try to justify it all to you, but frankly you would never believe me. I can tell that my mojo is starting to show some cracks along the edges, as it always does when things start going pear-shaped, but just telling you," he stopped pacing in front of the group, "never solves anything. So! I'm going to do two things, then we'll just see how things go, hmm? Now here is the first thing."

Taking his wand from his gauntlet with deliberate and demonstrative movements, he swished it into the air behind him, conjuring a large poster on an easel. Across the poster were written three simple statements:

 **How old is Harry Potter?**

 **How did the ground team survive our last mission?**

 **How are we all sitting side by side, in a straight line, in this room?**

"The second thing I'm going to do is this."

Harry dragged his wand in a line, pointing at each of the people arrayed in front of him, before jabbing back at himself and saying _Finite Incantatem._

For a quiet instant, nothing happened. Harry chose not to force his minor editing of reality away, reality was kind enough to indulge him by slipping _slowly_ back into focus, and as a result it took thirty seconds for a group of otherwise intelligent and observant people to begin connecting the dots in front of them.

First, Technician First Class Caroline Grenado shifted in her chair, glancing idly to her sides with a measuring look in her eyes, then all hell nearly broke loose. The ground crew looked absolutely terrified, began shouting, and Tali visibly ran a radiation exposure program on her omni-tool. All of the engineers and nearly all of the techs seemed very bothered, staring at the ground around them. The requisitions officer fired up a logistics application on his omni-tool and began taking readings of the dimensions of the cargo hold, and confusion was the general order of the day.

Thankfully they were all under silencing spells, so Harry got the silence he treasured alongside the full visual of thirty two people and a Rachni queen all kind-of freaking out. It took about a minute and a half for the crew to get a hold of themselves and calm down, an amount of time drastically shortened by how none of them could remove their bottoms from their seats. Harry was sure he was going to pay for it later, Wrex in particular looked exceedingly unhappy, but it amused him for a moment so it was worth it. The Krogan battlemaster and the Asari matriarch were both wreathed in the telltale glowing aura of their biotics, each testing their restraints, but while Benezia looked intrigued, Wrex appeared to be applying a massive positive force to himself, effectively crushing his chair and warping the deck plating below him.

"So I imagine you have some questions," Harry's eyes twinkled like fireworks at a Krogan bar-mitzvah. Somehow he was the only one amused by the situation.

Wrex relaxed his power, and the techies put away their omni tools, each sitting somewhat gingerly on seats they were visibly unsure of, while he grinned widely from the conjured stool he sat on.

Harry snapped his fingers, the crack of the noise echoing in the mostly empty bay, and signaling the beginning of the questions. By virtue of sheer homicidal will expressed via the medium of facial expression, Wrex won the right to first question.

"Explain, Punk. Now."

"Sure! The easy explanation is that I'm a wizard. My people went by many names while we still lived and at least one of them should translate for you guys. They called us witch-doctors, shaman, magicians, or warlocks."

Benezia seemed caught between disbelief and acceptance, and to a certain extent Ashley's tightly knit brow indicated a similar reaction, but they were the only ones not openly sniffing at Harry's claim. Well, the queen wasn't either, but Harry was about thirty percent certain her 'sniffing' would release neurotoxins or something, so he just counted her as a pass.

"There _isn't_ a scientific explanation for me or my power, and I've lived long enough to say that with authority. What I can do actively defies explanation, I can show you terabytes of data where scientifically rigorous actions produce different and often opposing physical and electromagnetic effects. The _least_ wrong answer I can give you is that I can manipulate a kind of chaotic zero point energy, allowing me to do insane things like stand at ground zero of a nuclear blast untouched, and teleport the ground crew into orbit. Again, that explanation is wrong, but it's the least wrong answer that will make any sense."

Harry's statement quieted the room effectively. His claims were completely insane, but the crew of the Normandy had hardly been picked for lack of intelligence. The fact that not an hour ago the entire ground crew's armor reported their positions at the heart of a nuclear inferno, and the fact that they were in the cargo bay despite the Normandy having never left orbit were powerful pieces of evidence for insanity. Requisitions Officer Germeen Barret in particular looked especially convinced, his eyes were alive with the possibilities of a space bigger on the inside than the outside.

Still, there was some dissent. Harry was suddenly grateful for Garrus Vakarian, after all it was hard to dramatically prove something without someone willing to doubt it.

In the flanged voice of his people, the Turian quickly spat a word which translated into English roughly as, "Bullshit."

"You could do everything weird we've seen you do using mass effect fields."

Harry smiled, "All of it, my metallic friend? What year were you born, Vakarian?"

The Turian's mandibles shook outward for a moment, and in a suspicious voice he responded, his translator pausing imperceptibly as it converted to human reckoning, "2156..."

Harry looked at the crew, making casual eye contact with his people, "I was born in the year 1981."

The human crowd immediately looked taken aback, and after another almost nonexistent pause the aliens did as well.

The flanged voice spoke up again, "Impossible."

"I was present at the founding of the systems alliance, I'm actually in the background of some of the vids of the treaty signing. The South East Asian alliance had actually brought a bomb and I didn't have enough time to disarm it and escape the photo shoot, come to think of it, I wasn't on staff for that event. I saved those worthless politicians for free!"

Harry looked disgusted with himself, before shaking it off and continuing.

"Anyway, that was only like forty years ago, and theoretically my good looks could be explained by an awesome genetic engineering package. Let me ask you this though, have any of you ever looked at the original passenger manifest of the first wave lunar colonists?"

Wrex didn't bother, and neither did Garrus or Benezia, but they did look to Kaiden who immediately dived into the extranet on his omni tool. Further down the line a number of the techs were searching, and from their whispered comments they were looking for confirmation from different extranet locations.

This time Jane Shepard spoke up, "Not three days ago you told me you spoofed Citadel records to show the Normandy as rated for operations in biological hot zones! Why should I believe this?"

A few of the techs chuckled and Harry's smile grew teeth, "Shep, we _are_ rated for that. Your fancy armor has an on board medical suite superior to most colonial hospitals, and you have the training. You're an N-7, luv. Setting those facts aside, I'm a Spectre, I'm legally entitled to do that kind of thing from time to time. I even have access codes for those databases somewhere, but none of that's important, because think for a second about the ridiculousness of me changing a hundred and fifty-odd year old historical record without anyone noticing."

Harry's smile wasn't, however, due to superior evidence. Rather he was smiling he absolutely could, after all his personal history went back that far and he certainly hid that often enough. The crew of a cutting edge alliance frigate hasn't thought to question the ground team teleporting into space after all. In this particular case it was true though.

Jane looked at him, her sharp eyes still accusing, "You sat next to Mark Armstrong. First mayor of the moon, Mark Armstrong?"

Harry's smile died a little, "Yeah. He was always going on about the rising price of air, the pillock."

The crew, those who weren't still chasing down other historical records, quieted again and looked decidedly contemplative. Garrus looked unconvinced still, but Harry wrote that off to stubbornness and not real disbelief. He was okay with it either way though, because he had a final act.

Standing and casually vanishing his stool, Harry drew attention back to himself.

"I have one last evidence I can give, and like magicians have for hundreds of years, I must now call for a volunteer from the audience. Wrex, up and at'em soldier."

The cushioning charm Harry erected under the Krogan's broken seat began decaying, forcing the one ton god of war to his feet.

"Remember how you told me you were gonna shoot me later? God news! Now is later, have a go!"

The crew didn't have time to gasp before the Krogan responded with a simple affirmative, and drew his beloved shotgun from the magnetic clip the base of his spine. The gun expanded smoothly from storage mode, and in the hands of a master took less than two seconds to go from holstered to fire.

The shotgun coughed once, the whine and dull thump of the rail gun completely overshadowed by the wet noise of a torso rapidly disassembling. A wide circle of red spread across the back end of the bay, and just a bit onto the roof, small slivers of white spine and ribs decorating the crimson mess like grim confetti.

Harry's body fell backward even as his knees buckled, collapsing in defeat in front of the Krogan, and when the sound of his armor clacking on the deck plate settled the bay exploded into disarray.

With the wizard's 'death', all of the sticking charms keeping the crew seated failed, allowing them to leave their seats, but at the same time the space expansion he cast on the bay also lost its power. Dimensionally transcendental space collapsed, leaving thirty one humanoids and a Rachni queen in one huge pile with a Krogan standing confused in front of it, starting at the shotgun in his hands like it had betrayed him.

The bay was a font of chaos, with half the crew trying to draw guns on the rogue Krogan and the other half trying valiantly to not get crushed by nearly a ton of tentacles and chitin. The struggle went on for ten whole minutes before Benezia had enough and just upset the whole pile with an angled biotic field, freeing the crushed crew from their Rachni prison and spreading them out over the rest of the deck.

The whole time Wrex just continued staring at his gun in disbelief, under his breath he whispered, "I liked him."

Jane separated from the group, approaching Wrex with her pistol drawn, "What the fuck Wrex!"

The Krogan continued staring numbly at his gun, "I thought he would shield, or his barriers were up, or... I saw him get shot point blank by Geth earlier, he shrugged it off..."

She lowered her gun, Wrex looked lost, almost pathetic without his usual dangerous air. For the first time since she had met the dinosaur, he looked old.

"He just got done telling us he was some kind of immortal all powerful witch..."

Jane lowered her side arm and stared at the shotgun in Wrex's hands. After the things she had seen the crazy bastard do, she probably would have shot him if he asked too, but now...

An arm draped around her shoulders, bringing her into a rather metallic and angled half hug. The jagged edge of a plate dug into her ribs, but she didn't mind. For all his being an annoying bastard, Harry really had seemed like he could do anything. Hell, she still remembered the wild look in his eyes on Elysium when-

Hold on.

The arm around her was attached to a hand with a few more fingers than the average Krogan boasted, also Wrex was a bit taller than her, certainly tall enough for her shoulder to tuck under his and not meet it awkwardly, and there weren't any other humans on this side of the queen, who took up enough of the bay to effectively seal her and Wrex of from the rest of the crew, so-

"Jane, luv, if you keep thinking that hard you're going to burst something, and believe you me, that rather hurts."

She shivered slightly as she looked to the presence on her right. Two emerald eyes met hers evenly, below them a grin that might be charming under other circumstances. Jane couldn't help herself, she let her gaze drop further to his chest where she was being poked by a chest-plate. A broken chest plate, its entire side blasted off leaving a jagged surface that edge into her side. A rib regrew before her eyes, as blood flowed sluggishly from the wound, staining the leg of her duty uniform.

"It's worse than it looks, trust me, after the first few times it happens to you it gets a lot easier to deal with."

Jane Shepard credited her years of training for the five seconds she maintained eye contact before fainting.

As he stood over her collapsed form he looked at Wrex, who appeared to have just seen someone rise from the dead. Which was a fair reaction. Harry coughed, a hacking wet sound, and spit a few metal chunks into his hand.

Harry separated one and raised it closer to his eyes, squinting he said, "I didn't know you used polonium rounds. Itches a bit."

Even the hum of the engines died in that moment, the deck no longer vibrated imperceptibly beneath their feet, leaving the cargo hold in complete silence. Harry calmly twirled his wand, re-growing the rest of a lung, and when he felt he had enough mass south of his collar, he spoke again.

"Even among my people, as weird as it sounds, even among people who reshaped reality by thinking really hard, I am unique. When I was young I made a hideous mistake, I accidentally united three artifacts never meant to be combined, and in doing so I became what I am today. Immortal, indestructible, unending. I am the master of death, in every one of its terrible and beautiful forms."

For one glorious moment Urdnot Wrex stared upon a god made flesh, and if he was honest with himself, he was a little unimpressed.

* * *

OMAKE

"I'm not quite human. Not really. An old friend thought that I was, and my people were, the next real step in human evolution. Homo Magus, she said-"

"-Now hold on a sec, I thought for humans homo meant-"

"INTERRUPT ME AGAIN VAKARIAN, SEE WHAT HAPPENS!"

* * *

[A/N]: Next time on Getting too old for this: the Harry finds what he believes to be the reborn spirit of his homicidal ex-wife, the Rachni queen presses charges on a certain low end porn distributor, and Kaiden and Garrus make out.


	13. Chapter 13

**Chapter 13**

* * *

 **Transit from Sentry Omega cluster, Hoc system, SSV Normandy – 06.12.2183**

The Normandy resumed its normal operation, perhaps just a bit quieter, Joker guided his beloved ship away from the Sentry Omega cluster.

For the moment, the ship was traveling without direction. The Normandy held more information specialists, proportionally, than eighty-five percent of Humanity's other naval commands, and as they moved away from Virmire it showed. Techs and analysts were processing data ripped from Saren's servers planet side, and connecting back into Citadel standard comm nets got them updates from C-Sec's data mining and intel. Harry and Benezia, and therefore the crew, knew most of Saren's endgame, but they needed locations of Geth battle groups and any other assets he had lying around. Harry had a team of five dedicated entirely to tracking shipments of the weird 'dragon's tooth' reaper tech Saren had been sending around so freely.

Thankfully Virmire lay in one of the relay network's little cul-de-sacs, so they had about a standard day of travel and static discharge to figure out just where in the hell they were going next before they began wasting time.

The day was also helpful, giving as it did a bit of distance for the crew to figure out how they each felt emotionally and professionally about working for what seemed a lot like a living god. Rather understandably most on board were freaking out more about the Potter issue than the giant sentient genocides machines from literally beyond the stars.

Naturally, when everything had mostly settled in the crew's minds, most realized their chain of command needed to be informed. In the six hours that followed Harry's revelations (of note: Chief Williams was not the only one to consult the book of Revelations afterward) no less than twenty nine people sat down to report Harry to their collective home governments, and of those not a single one managed to write what they intended. Instead the Alliance received a troubling number of in depth reports on a new knitting circle Harry established during off-hours. The Hierarchy got a very tentative report on the ritual practices of the Blue Star sect of Human paganism, the Flotilla got a hacked copy of Colossus armor decontamination protocols, and Matriarch Athetya got a rather charming message asking after her health and how her bar was doing.

Harry gave his crew a courtesy period of four hours before directing them to read the reports they sent, and politely informing them that they were physically incapable of sharing his secrets. No one was very happy, about that or the whole 'dark arts knowledge suppression hex' explanation. The wizard himself gleefully hid from the angry shouting in his cabin, and while he had not known Benezia was that unhappy about contacting her ex, he was sure as shit going to laugh at her more later for it, namely when she calmed down.

By the time the Normandy hit the Hercules system in the Attican Beta cluster they hadn't reached any solid conclusions, So Harry called the command team together to make some decisions.

* * *

 **Attican Beta cluster, Hercules system, Static discharge orbit over Zatorus, SSV Normandy – 06.13.2183**

"Sooooo, ideas?"

For whatever reason Harry sat alone on one side of the briefing room, the rest of the ground crew and Pressly sat on the other, some on flash-formed stools where chairs weren't available. Harry suspected they weren't happy with him for some reason. The why escaped him, so like every other troubling fact or decision he encountered in his adult life, he chose to ignore it and move on.

Pressly started, "It was buried, but material shipments and relay transit logs seem to indicate a fairly significant buildup of Geth platforms and ships in the Armstrong cluster. That might be a good place to start."

"C-sec has been closely monitoring the four relays we got from the Rachni," Gurus inclined his head to the screen on the end of the table containing the image of the Queen, who waved a tentacle in response, "There's been a little traffic we could go examine."

Harry waved off the suggestions, "We got all this information from citadel sources, so resources have already been allocated. Asari survey teams are all over those Rachni systems, they got something off the beacon from Eden Prime that has them scrambling, apparently it wasn't as melted as it looked. As for the Armstrong cluster, I saw the same report yesterday, and I managed to sweet talk a contact into swinging the Turian Seventh fleet though the neighborhood."

Most just blinked at that, Pressly visibly just moved on to the next entry on his datapad, but Garrus couldn't let it go.

"I'm sorry, you what?"

Harry looked down at a file on his omnitool, and shrugged dismissively, "A friend of mine noticed a distressed Elcor, looked into it, long story short I caught Septimus Oraka being a prick and he owes me for keeping it all quiet."

"You're blackmailing a Turian general?"

Jane's deadpan comment did not manage to pierce Harry's shroud of nonchalance, as he responded without looking up, "Only a little, it barely counts."

Benezia coughed gently from her place at the table, drawing attention to herself, "Harry, l have been in control of myself for about 72 hours now, and I have given you the last standard day without comment. When will you begin to act on the information you found in me?"

The rest of the command team looked curiously at her, but her focus was solely on Harry whose nonchalance quickly became sheepishness with just a hint of petulance.

"I can't help but notice you've not shared anything, which can be partially explained by the mission we were headed in to and have now finished, but perhaps it is time."

Harry sighed and let the interface on his wrist fade, "But I don't want to..."

The statement came out just as Harry didn't intend: like the complaint of a seven year old.

Jane envisioned the bottle of Asari hard liquor hidden in her bunk, and said in the tone of an exasperated parent, "Potter..."

Harry winced, "Haven't I done enough of these dramatic reveals? Can't you guys just stop needing to know things?"

"Harry James Potter."

Harry sighed, "God damn it. Fine. So there's the bad news, the worse news, and the news so bad it might get even me fired," for a moment he looked very tired, "I got a lot of intel from how I sort of de-conditioned Benezia, more than even you realize, Nezzie."

The Asari scowled automatically at the name, and Harry regained an ounce of cheer from annoying her for making him do this.

"The bad news you guys already know. Our old friend Sovereign is the real enemy. Like I said before, it, or he, or whatever, is a reaper. An AI in the shell of a hugely, hilariously, advanced dreadnaught. I mean it was a few hundred meters from ground zero of a hundred megaton fusion device and it flew away like nothing happened. The worse news I had to piece together from a number of different memories, but it amounts to this: Sovereign is just a single example, one individual, of a species. There are potentially millions more, potentially ones bigger and worse, and they are all hibernating outside the plane of the galaxy in dark space. Sovereign is their vanguard. What Saren was doing, and what it's doing now, is trying to activate a relay to bring its people in."

It was crazy edging on inconceivable, and it showed in the mixed disbelief and shock on the faces across from him. He gave them a moment to absorb, in fairness it was really just hit after hit on this ship, eleven days ago no one on board had been more than vaguely aware of what the Geth were.

"It gets worse. Obviously dark space is a bit farther away than a normal relay jump, and without positional reference points from being surrounded by stars and stuff, astrogation is way more uncertain. For us, if our ship is oriented a few fractions of an arc-second off, it's no big deal. Relay protocols are robust to account for biological inferiority, and we're surrounded by reference points we can use to figure things out. From outside the rim of the galaxy, from that utterly insane distance a mistake of a thousandth of an arc-second means arrive potentially hundreds of lightyears off the mark. That kind of thing requires specialized relay hardware to account for those errors, and there is no easy way to say this, that specialized relay hardware is the Citadel. Sovereign was absolutely clear on this in every conversation with Benezia or in her presence. The Citadel is the dark space relay. This, though it initially seems counter-intuitive, is why he is after this Conduit thing. It's not a weapon or a key or anything we predicted, it's a backdoor gate into the Citadel, so he can secure the station arm controls. Do you all remember that cool statue of a relay in the presidium? Not so much a statue, as much as a very specific point to point relay."

"That's impossible!"

Tali's synthesized voice, despite the limitations there-in, fairly exemplified the word incredulous.

Harry lifted a hand in response and wiggled it, "Eh."

"No, I mean the presidium has a roof. Setting aside the concerns of the effect of a mass free corridor being projected through the Citadel, and even assuming no other arm got in the way, anything projected through this conduit would... would just splatter across the top of the presidium!"

"Well. You're not wrong, but I have two counter points. One, it's been used before. Sovereign couldn't just signal the relay to open it. That is the normal procedure and it not working is why Saren got involved at all. Sovereign concluded that the Protheans used it at some point to disable the 'normal' reaper ingress signal. The fact that we're not already dead indicates that it functions. And two," Harry popped himself to a position directly at her side, his arm around her shoulders, "It's not impossible."

Tali screamed briefly and jumped out of her seat, landing indelicately on her butt at Harry's feet, another pop sounded and Harry was back in his chair across the room. She shot him a dirty look as she regained her seat, and despite the tone of the conversation Ashley snickered.

"The Protheans were so far ahead of us in their understanding of mass effect tech that it's not funny, and honestly it doesn't matter, the scientific explanation for the conduit isn't even on the first ten pages of our priorities. The biggest issue is that I have no concrete proof of this. Information gathered from Asari melds isn't admissible in court, so I doubt a Human replicating the feat is going to hold water with the council. _And,_ even if any of us could find some kind of physical proof of these things, we cannot allow anyone to examine it. In fact I'm saying right now, if you ever encounter any reaper tech, even as much as a damn info storage device, don't think, don't ask questions, nothing. It's just thermite and corrosive acid fun time."

Before Harry could continue there were general grumblings of dissent.

"No, you don't understand. Have you all forgotten what happened to our illustrious Asari overlord over here? Of all species currently active in the galaxy the Asari are the most likely to be able to resist mind control or any other kind of mental influence. Benezia over here is an Asari Matriarch. She's been melding, with everything that entails, for nigh on a thousand years and she fell under Sovereign's control. The reapers can do that same kind of thing with _inactive_ samples of their technology. They have... artifacts, for lack of a better word, that serve only to enact this kind of mind control. Look, I'm a wizard, I am a master of the mental arts, I can pull thoughts out of a protected mind at fifty paces sight unseen and until I brought it to your attention no one in the galaxy questioned actual physical evidence proving I was one of the first lunar colonists. I've fought men and women misusing the power to bend reality since before I was a bloody teenager, and these reapers have an ability to influence minds at a scale and with an efficacy that terrifies me."

Harry's little speech was delivered entirely without his normal semi-whimsical tone. For a moment he was no longer fearless leader, bane of squirrel and moose, he was _Fearless Leader_ , the man that didn't blink when he set off a nuclear weapon less than ten meters away from himself.

"Now. Here is the news so bad it might get me fired, and for context, I threatened to burn down Noveria's corporate head office last week with no repercussions. The Citadel is a specialized relay pointed out into dark space specifically for the reapers and with protocols only they can access, why would that be the case if the Protheans made it? The most logical conclusion is that they didn't. It's older than the Protheans, even they were just squatters on a derelict spacestation they found. So either the Soveriegn is lying and Reapers repurposed it from an even older race, or the citadel, and therefore all of the relays, are Reaper constructions. Reaper artifacts."

Jane buried her face in her hands, and Ashley leaned forward, "So you're saying-"

"Yeah. I wish I wasn't. I, we, need to convince the council to abandon the center of galactic civilization, and then probably lace the thing with anti-matter and toss it at a sun. There's a _chance_ the thing isn't mind controlling the highest levels of our government, I'm leaning that way because I feel like we would have seen more apocalyptic death cults if that were the case, but even if the Citadel is completely innocent, do we want all war councils, census data, and diplomatic communications running through what is essentially an enemy installation? One we don't even effectively maintain or understand? And again, we have to do this while actively denying our own cause any primary evidence of our enemy's true strength and identity."

Kaiden spoke up for the first time in the briefing, alas his two cents weren't particularly groundbreaking, "I have no idea how to react to that."

The room fell silent, no one else knew quite how to react either.

Tali spoke up after a bit, "Well, if primary evidence of reapers has to be destroyed, could we find secondary evidence?"

Harry shrugged, "It's not like I hadn't thought of that, I mean sure we could, but we would need overwhelming and detailed evidence of this stuff. Prothean records are scattered, incomplete, or _really_ corrupted. I mean if you think about it the Asari have been looking into all that Prothean bollocks since before they went outside their solar system, and that was over three thousand years ago. We're just finding this out now. The beacon probably had evidence, but it looked like Elcor sculpture by the time we were done with it. You all only believe me because you watched me regrow my torso yesterday."

Jane shuddered and Tali responded, "The Protheans probably dealt with this mind control, and proof of it would go a long way towards making this all make sense. They may have even found a way to deal with it that didn't involve an insane wizard," for a voice relayed via synthesizer, Harry thought she sure managed to inject a lot of derision, "and it's unlikely that the conduit would be anywhere other than a military base or other facility. If the Protheans used it to confine the Citadel relay activation to a local connection then there has to be some info around there. We just need to keep following the same path Saren was going down."

Harry frowned and looked off into the distance, weighing their options. The rest of the group similarly engaged in introspection, some examining notes and reports on personal data pads. The enormity of their task was very much sinking in.

After a beat of silence, Benezia leaned forward and rested her chin on clasped hands, "This may be the time and place to inject a bit of personal business then."

Harry immediately brightened, far more than the apparent comment deserved, "You're thinking of Liara, aren't you?"

She sat back in her chair and looked confused, "How did you even know I had a daughter?"

Harry looked smug, "Love, I spent nine hundred and eighty four years inside your head. I probably remember giving birth to her with more clarity than you do."

The matriarch's cheeks colored deeply as he continued, "I've been alive for just over two centuries, but I've seen a _lot_ more years than just the ones I've been around for. Athetya asked about her, didn't she?"

Benezia nodded, her cheeks still burning over the thought of the things he had seen, but Harry was looking off in the distance in thought, "Liara though... That's brilliant."

Harry leaned back not his chair, smug edging into cat-that-caught-the-canary style self-satisfaction, "She's been looking into the end of the Protheans for nearly fifty years! And hell, we know now that she's been on the right track for the last twenty. She was just published too, in… in…"

Harry snapped his finger as he tried to place it, before Benezia injected, "Citadel Archeo-Technological Review."

"Exactly, that's not nothing, she's got some brand recognition going for her, this could work. Joker! We have our heading!"

A speaker crackled gently to life in the room and Joker's voice rang out, "We're in space jackass, we need more than a heading."

* * *

 **Artemis Tau cluster, Knossos system, SSV Normandy – 06.15.2183**

The Knossos system broke the team's streak of entering systems to find hostile forces already present, or it did if you asked Harry. Apparently Shepard felt that threatening murder and ruin on legitimate corporate interests and then feeling offended when their defense systems tried to establish a hard lock wasn't justified, somehow. She didn't appreciate being called an old fuddy-duddy, and they called it even when she realized she could fatally shoot him almost completely guilt free, and made her own threats to that effect.

The location of interest was the planet Therum, which had Prothean ruins both extensive, and covered in mostly cooled lava flows. Joker was keen to comment on the 'mostly' cooled issue, due for the most part to how they approached from the dark side of the planet. From orbit Therum looked a lot like hell.

Huge lakes of lava covered significant portions of the crust, each dotted with eldritch looking refineries and surrounded by mining camps. Therum's surface was dead of natural life, which made sense given the near total lack of free water, but it was inhabited all the same by scores of camps sending resources to Earth. Overall, hell was a safe visual metaphor.

The Normandy crossed the terminator and entered the light, heading toward the grid coordinates Benezia dimly remembered and Athetya re-sent. The terrain under them looked a little less like the seventh circle at night and more like a regular shitty place to be, they covered thousands of kilometers from orbit before entering atmosphere and prepping for a standard drop.

Joker was examining satellite analysis for a proper drop site, setting the ship on a nice curve for the Mako's release, when Harry stopped him with a light hand on his shoulder.

"Set the Normandy for a nice big circle around the dig site. There's no reason to waste time on finding a landing zone when we don't have to."

The pilot adjusted his cap and looked over his shoulder, "Voodoo?"

Harry smiled and confirmed, "Voodoo."

He returned his gaze to his controls and shook his head, "You're the boss. Somehow."

"Hey! I'm very qualified. I'm a qualified person. I qualify things all the time, a veritable qualifier over here."

"I'm not the one that has to convince Garrus and that pissed off dinosaur down in the hold to go along with whatever it is you're going to do to them."

Harry's eye widened, "I forgot about that."

A beat of silence as Joker expertly adjusted the Normandy's path to a wide in-atmo orbit over the target zone.

"This'll be fun!"

* * *

 **Artemis Tau cluster, Knossos system, Therum, Geth collective – Sector 15-2 communication node – 06.15.2183**

FE80:17F8:EEEA:50AA:0202:B3FF:FE1E:8329-

 **report:** optical sensor data indicates incoming vessel (90.053 [percent] confidence)

 **query:** additional platform reports RE: azimuthal south-27.478[degrees]-east

FE80:17F8:EEEA:50AA:0202:B3FF:FE1E:8321-

 **response:** sensor data confirmed among polled units inside local horizon

FE80:17F8:EEEA:50AA:0202:B3FF:FF2E:9996-

 **response:** sensor data confirms ship location (97.223 [percent] confidence) based on observed ship entrance to atmosphere above local grid reference 1048,998

FE80:17F8:EEEA:50AA:0202:B3FF:FE1E:8329-

 **report:** hull configuration inconsistent with observed commercial standards

 **report:** hull features along observed [front-bottom] section of hull indicates concealed turret location

 **conjecture:** vessel classed with military designation

 **query:** hull comparison among observed vessels for identification

FE80:17F8:549D:7098:556B:AAFF:D760:9142-

 **response:** hull configuration cross referenced with runtimes present in locations [citadel] [relay649] [relay135]

 **response:** cross reference shows vessel designation (98.901 [percent] confidence) SSV Normandy

 **response:** known crew profile attached

 **addendum:** crew profile incomplete

FE80:17F8:EEEA:50AA:0202:B3FF:FE1E:8329-

 **report:** vessel undergoing transit to local grid reference 508, 349 (65.934 [percent] confidence)

FE80:17F8:EEEA:50AA:0202:B3FF:FF2E:9996-

 **correction:** (95.222 [percent] confidence) orbital path indicative of pathing to local grid reference 508,349

FE80:17F8:549D:7098:556B:AAFF:D760:9142-

 **correction:** (99.464 [percent] confidence) update from runtimes present in locations [Noveria] [Virmire] indicate vessel SSV Normandy contains NAZARA priority target designated Benezia

 **report:** Benezia (84.547 [percent] confidence) seeking progeny located near local grid reference 508,349

FE80:17F8:EEEA:50AA:0202:B3FF:FE1E:8329-

 **response:** combat platforms near local grid reference 508,349 warming

 **response:** heavy combat platforms routed to local grid reference 508,349 eta 9m46.8s

FE80:17F8:549D:7098:556B:AAFF:D760:9142-

 **report:** vessel SSV Normandy known combat deployment mode includes sub-orbital drop of Human Systems Alliance M35 Mako

 **report:** eta to SSV Normandy combatant deployment (86.521 [percent] confidence) 12m31.

 **report:** eta to combatant arrival at local grid reference (73.876 [percent] confid-

:/:/:/:/:HIGHPRIORITYINTERRUPT:/:/:/:/

:/:/:/:/:HIGHPRIORITYINTERRUPT:/:/:/:/

FE80:17F8:EEEA:50AA:0202:B3FF:FE1E:8345-

 **ALERT:** 9 combatant units present in local grid reference 508,349

 **ALERT:** unknown entrance vector

 **ALERT:** combatants engaging in audible range communication - transcript follows

Unknown 1-Turian: DAMN YOUR NECROMANCY HUMAN!

Unknown 2-Human: You looked that word up just for this didn't you?

[Retching]

Unknown 2-Human: Oh, okay. Vomit. Right. That's the optimal response, you big baby.

Unknown 3-Human: Hey look, a distraction. I mean robots. Let's focus.

FE80:17F8:549D:7098:556B:AAFF:D760:9142-

 **analysis:** Unknown 1 identity (95.389 [percent] confidence) Garrus Vakarian

 **analysis:** Unknown 2 identity (43.348 [percent] confidence) Harry Potter

 **analysis:** Unknown 3 identity (99.660 [percent] confidence) Jane Shepard

 **report:** anomaly in identification of Unknown 2

 **query:** optical and sonic sensor readings RE: Unknown 2

...

...

...

FE80:17F8:549D:7098:556B:AAFF:D760:9142-

 **ping:** runtime address range

FE80:17F8:EEEA:50AA:0202:B3FF:FE10::

FE80:17F8:EEEA:50AA:0202:B3FF:FE1F:FFFF

32 data bytes

-request timeout

-request timeout

-request timeout

-request timeout

-request timeout

-request timeout

FE80:17F8:549D:7098:556B:AAFF:D760:9142-

 **report:** contact lost with runtimes downloaded to combat platforms located at local grid reference 508,349

 **report:** heavy combat platforms rerouted eta 12m19.2s

 **response:** combat platforms located in installation below local grid reference 508,349 warming

* * *

 **Artemis Tau cluster, Knossos system, Therum, Prothean dig site – 06.15.2183**

"So what do you call these?"

The advanced poly-ceramic-whatever that capped Harry's boot clacked loudly as he kicked the huge quadrupedal Geth platform. For a giant mechanical giraffe lookalike it had put up a decent fight, he had to actually try to strip it of its shields.

Tali perked up from where she stood, buried in the thing's guts. As she spoke Harry had to force himself to look away, her adorable mannerisms and child-like delight utterly, and stomach churningly, at odds with the thick white conducting fluid covering her. Like a... a... robot blood bukkake. He shuddered. And mentally composed an email to one of his producers.

"In the Flotilla we called them armatures. They're a fairly recent development."

Harry kicked the body of the huge platform a second time, the clank ringing inside the now open body cavity hollowly.

"Armature, what is that, it's like the frame under a statue, innit?"

Her head cocked to the side for a second, before disappearing inside the hulk again, her voice echoing out from inside the body, "Never thought about it, doesn't make much of a difference, all I know is they all have a chunk of very highly purified eezo locked in a magnetically sealed core. It's enough to power a large shuttle, or it can go for about a hundred-eighty thousand credits on the open market. Most importantly though it's not part of the normal self-destruct protocol."

"Punk! We gotta move! Joker's got incoming dropships. We've got ten minutes to get in the mine and fortify before they're on top of us!"

Harry waved the Krogan off and continued to stare, still somewhat disturbed, at the body of the Geth armature. There was a strong vibration, a loud pop, and then a Quarian fist lifted an alien football-looking-thing out of the huge combat platform triumphantly.

"Come on then, we're off."

Holding his hand out, Harry helped the slight being out of the body she had been working in, and on to the ground proper. Kaiden, Jenkins, and Garrus piled the broken robots next to the entrance to the dig site, marking them with a beacon for later retrieval.

The crew of the Normandy officially had the highest Geth body count of any sentient for the past two hundred fifty years or so, and there were a grand total of nine combatants on the ship. Those stats made the Geth almost an entirely unknown enemy force, so naturally the Alliance and the Council were both itching for samples of modern Geth tech to pull apart. Harry was far from an expert in cutting edge mass effect tech, or robotics, but he figured they had to have something special going on. The whole creepy 'superconducting fluid' thing was certainly unique, and machines weren't known for inefficient design choices.

Shaking his head at the whole thing he turned to Jane, who looked concerned. Her arms were tight to her body and she was sort of bouncing on her toes, not unlike a boxer. Curiosity overtook him.

"What's got your dovecotes all aflutter?"

She slowed down for a second and looked at him curiously, Harry sighed and tried again.

"What're you worried about, you look worried."

She stared at him incredulously, "I know why the dinosaur over there isn't worried, he likes getting shot at, but why in the hell are we wasting time out here when we have Geth armor inbound and a scientist to rescue?"

Harry snorted, "I'm a wizard, luv. I do things at my own pace, and what's more, I can afford to. It was once said that a wizard is never late, nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to. It was valid two hundred years ago and its valid again today."

The full squad mustered around him, and Harry waved a hand to the dig site entrance, giving a nod to Wrex and Ashley to take point. The pair swept into the raised entrance and after a moment Garrus and Jenkins followed, signaling the rest to make their way in.

Before she left his side Jane gave him a dirty look and Harry chuckled, "You'll see."

They stepped up the ramp leading to the entrance to the dig site, and as they crested it Harry turned. He looked out at the ground surrounding the entrance with a gimlet eye, and after a moment drew his wand in a line around the opening resulting in a thick translucent wall of red light forming around the door.

Pitching his voice so it would carry to the ears of his worried minder just down the tunnel behind him, Harry murmured a few nonsense words and a phrase he knew she would catch, "Gotta love Proxima Centauran Doom wards."

Jane's shoulders visibly lost tension as they marched toward their wayward target, and Harry cracked a huge smile at her back.

* * *

 **Artemis Tau cluster, Knossos system, Therum, Prothean ruins – 06.15.2183**

The entrance tunnel shot down and north-northeast in an intense 36 degree slope and ran straight and true for just about a hundred meters, which sounds a lot like a death trap on paper. Especially given all of the guns with their safeties off, the odds of surviving tripping down a grade that steep weren't high. It didn't help that the slope looked like one of the Geth vomited rust and silicon lubricant down the whole thing. The only saving grace was how it was ringed by dips at constant intervals, but even those were awkward, angled as they were in such a way that they could easily catch an unwary ankle and sprain it.

The group advanced carefully into the mineshaft, and when they reached the end Wrex hit the door control. In front of them was a walkway overhanging a large cavern that butted against what looked like the side of some kind of Prothean skyscraper. A casual glance to the edge of the platforms showed probably fifty meters of exposed structure, interrupted at even intervals by what looked like windows made of shields.

From the next walkway level down the group heard a rifle discharge as a Geth Sniper unit bounced a shot off Wrex's face, and from immediately around the sniper a pair of the grey/white units with missile launchers began peppering Ashley with shots. The Krogan's barriers didn't even notice the damage and similarly Ashley's shields just shrugged off the damage, but the incoming fire sent everyone into motion.

Garrus poked his rifle between the bulk of the Krogan and the much more elegant bulk of the marine. Lining up a shot and firing once, he effectively beheaded the sniper unit.

In direct opposition to his barrier, Wrex was acutely aware of having been shot at. He shouted and initiated a biotic charge at the combat units. The Geth seemed to have been waiting for this though. The moment he began forming the miniscule mass-free corridor for his jump to them, they overcharged their guns and fired overcharged plasma blasts along the path he would take, straight at him. Wrex was about six meters up when the shots impacted, cancelling his momentum and releasing all the energy of his charge in a burst of Cherenkov radiation that momentarily blinded everyone watching, organic and synthetic alike.

As was his wont, Harry was the first to recover, though it could be more specifically stated he recovered first from the optical boom of a Krogan getting his ass knocked out of the air. He was far from the first to recover from the resulting laughter. Taking careful aim Harry brought his favorite pistol into action, this time enhanced by military grade tungsten ammunition and a few of his newer Potter™ brand modifications. It took four rounds to pierce the first unit's shields and another two to wreck its optics and telemetry.

By the time the first shock trooper died the second had recovered, and began reloading it's launcher for a second shot at the Krogan. As it prepared to fire at the more vulnerable target, it looked up to check positioning on the rest of its targets, only to find it's gaze directed down the barrels of nine other guns.

If Geth understood profanity, or had any parallel for it in their language, the unit would have cursed viciously before being reduced to scrap.

Garrus propped his rifle on the handrail of the walkway covering the area directly beneath the squad, and motioned the rest of them to continue along the path which wound right and down to the level Wrex landed on.

By the time they reached him, the Krogan himself was sitting on his tail and wearing an expression that, on any lesser being, would have been called a pout.

On him it was more of a battle-pout.

Harry reached him first and offered an arm to help him up, a smile wide on his face, "That was really cool!"

His exclamation was met with a, "Humph."

Wrex grabbed the proffered wrist and put all of his weight on it, intending to drag the upstart human to ground with him. To his surprised Harry easily took the load, his smile only widening. Harry used the motion of bringing Wrex to a vertical position to bring him close enough to whisper into his ear, "Re'em blood elixir, friend, and if you're nice I might find my way to giving you a share too."

For his part Wrex looked confused for a moment. No human should be that strong, not even with exo-skeletal enhancements in their armor. He had no idea what this Re'em blood elixir was, but that kind of power on a Krogan frame would make him a god! Or, at least in comparison to the undying man in front of him, a demi-god.

He grunted and nodded at Harry whose smile remained unchanged as they moved forward as a group. With no more immediate threats Garrus collapsed his sniper rifle and jogged to their position with his assault rifle out. The group moved as one towards the single elevator that lead further down into the depths of the ruins. As they closed Harry approached first, and gave a solid kick to the frame, resulting in a disturbing amount of shaking and a few supports audibly breaking off and crashing to the cavern floor far beneath them. He shook his head at the sounds and turned to the rest of the team.

"Alright! Who's ready for the next fun demonstration of wizard powers?! Actually this isn't that much of a wizard power. Tali! Give me a range to the ground down there," he said pointing a thumb over the edge of the walkway.

A moment's work produced a figure of around eighty meters, prompting Harry to look jubilantly on a suddenly uneasy crowd of soldiers (and one stateswoman), "At that range we'd each hit the ground at something like thirty or forty meters a second, which is fatal territory for nearly all of us. Wrex would probably hit around sixty-ish, which would be crippling but not necessarily fatal. The Geth at the end down there might push it over. Either way, what we're gonna do is lower all of your masses, to the point we'll all hit at a more comfortable four or five meters a second. It'll be just like doing it with a biotic field, except it's not a field so when one of us inevitably hits something and leaves my vicinity they don't fall to their deaths anyway."

Harry pulled out his wand and gave a swish and poke at each of his squad mates. Then, with a smile and a minor movement he jumped and perched on the edge of the handrail, "Just don't jump too hard."

With that Harry pushed off into a backflip and began falling to the floor far beneath them.

Richard Jenkins walked carefully to the edge their illustrious leader had just leapt from and glanced down, catching a nice view of Harry's ass as he evidently took aim with his pistol at some target only he could see.

He turned back to the rest of the group, who were each gingerly making small bouncing movements, matching their muscle memory to a new weight, one less than a hundredth of what they were used to. Benezia and Jane gave him questioning glances, to which he could only shrug. As usual, for all his insanity, the boss seemed legit.

He shrugged again to himself. If the boss said it was safe, it was probably safe. Only one way to find out for sure, really. Richard Jenkins gathered his wits, and jumped over the edge.

Well, over the edge in a really general sense.

Jenkins, despite being greener than a spring morning on a planet with an ammonia atmosphere, was a fully trained alliance marine. With his genetics package and training he could carry a seventy-five kilogram load and run flat out for a kilometer and a half, and he was wearing a set of armor with a standard powered exoskeleton designed to raise that number to a full two hundred fifty over three kilometers. When he jumped to cover the handrail, muscles and synthetic enhancements designed to casually hop with a working load of around three hundred kilograms pushed down on a total load that was in the neighborhood of five, throwing him into the roof of the cavern with a muted, "Fuck!"

He fell for a full second and a half before he was no longer visible to the rest of his laughing asshole squad mates.

The rest of the team gently made their way over to the edge, and mindful of the potential for mischief, hopped over the edge. Beneath them Jenkins was flailing wildly, trying to scoot through the air to the wall or a piece of cave support in order to reorient himself, and beneath him Harry fell in a graceful nosedive, occasionally firing pistol bursts to cancel some downward momentum and guide him around obstructions.

Halfway down was another level of walkway, and beneath it at the ground was a mass of collapsed catwalk, laying shattered and piled at the base of the exposed Prothean structure. Benezia, Garrus, Jane, and Tali chose to land with a quiet 'oomph' at the nominal halfway mark, while Wrex and Kaiden chose to ride their falls all the way in one shot. The whole group landed more or less in one piece at the base of the tower, Wrex and Kaiden having chosen to cancel their momentum with a generous application of shotgun in the moments before their landing.

They bounced/climbed their way down half a level of debris before a quiet voice called out in a plaintive tone, "Uh... hello? Could somebody help me? Please?"

Benezia twitched so hard at the voice that her involuntary movement sent her a meter into the air, but she took the jump and applied her biotics to essentially fly herself out, around the debris, and down to the source of the noise. Her voice filtered back to the rest of the team, "Little wing?"

"Mo- mother?"

"I'm here, child."

Even through a layer of broken steel walkway the maternal warmth in her voice reached the rest of them. Careful to not make the whole collapsed walkway/scaffolding situation worse, the team filtered down until they all stood before their target, Liara T'Soni, who floated in a field of blue energy on the other side of one of the blue shield windows they had fallen past on the way down.

"How did you get here?"

Benezia took the lead, "That's not important, child, what's important is that we are here now and we are going to get you out of there. Harry?"

Harry caught Wrex's gaze and directed him to the cavern behind them. The Krogan caught his intent and called Ashley, Garrus, Kaiden, and Jenkins over to secure the area. Turning, he walked to the energy field and put his hands against it, feeling for the firmness of the barrier and the way it wrapped energy around his hands as they tried to pass through. Benezia watched him critically, and every line of her body urging him to solve the problem faster.

He couldn't help himself however, "Remarkable, even fifty thousand years after their fall, Prothean tech is not only still active but running at design spec. I bet this thing would hold up against magma."

Next to them Tali was on her omnitool, taking readings of field strength and shooting small flash formed projectiles at it to test its response. Harry simply reached over to grab Benezia's wrist and with a pop they both appeared on the other side of the barrier.

As they appeared, gunfire broke out from their former position, causing Tali to duck and take cover while the rest of the group worked to clear out the handful of platforms that had been at the back of the cavern behind a bunch of mining equipment. Heedless of the life and death struggle across the barrier in front of her, Liara was turning her head as far around as she could to look at Harry and her mother.

Against the backdrop of a Krogan battle-cry and Ashley's customary cursing, the trapped Asari demanded, "How did you do that! That's a Prothean barrier curtain, it should be able to stand up to a sun at ranges of hundreds of thousands of kilometers, how could you just pop through it!"

Harry lit his omnitool off and got to work on a control panel next while Benezia walked around to her daughter's front, collapsing her rifle and storing it against her back, "Little wing, he is a godling, put him out of your mind and tell me how you are and how you got in this position?"

Liara reluctantly turned back to face her mother, but her thoughts were clearly on the impossibility working behind her, "The comm to the surface died after a few of the corporate security humans reported unknown incoming transports. I was working on one of the top few levels when the call came in so I went deeper down here, to where I knew a security console was. I tried to get security up, but ended up trapping myself here. Oh! You must be careful! There is a Krogan here along with the Geth!"

Benezia leaned around her daughter and looked at Harry with a raised eyebrow, despite his back being turned he removed one of his arms from the insides of the console and waved her off, "I got it."

The rifle fire from the other side of the barrier died down, and a few moments later with the sound of sparking electronics, the barrier curtain shut down. Liara fell directly on her feet, the security having caught her in a nice vertical position. Unfortunately she had been held in that position motionless for going on eight hours and her legs were not, as it happened, up to the challenge of supporting her weight so quickly. She fell forward and cracked her head on the paneled floor, knocking herself clean out.

Benezia shrieked, drawing the attention of the rest of the team, and by the time they all arrived back at the former site of the barrier, Harry was cradling Liara's head in his lap and doing everything he could to adapt standard concussion spells to a brain structure they had never been intended to heal. An action that took the form of him staring intently into her eyes and giving a head massage that had, on another world and in another age, won county wide recognition. When she finally came to Liara felt the most pleasurable sensation she had experienced in her young life, staring into the most gorgeous green eyes sitting on the face of a man her mother had called a god.

When she came to, all Harry saw was a gleam in her eyes that reminded him of a century of marriage that ended abruptly with a bone knife inserted between the T11 and T12 vertebrae while he had been asleep. The scar still itched like crazy when it rained.

On earth.

In Surrey.

Harry had doubled check meteorological reports.

Naturally things didn't substantially improve from there.

Behind the group (Harry still staring unnervingly into the eyes of the monogender in his lap) the strange shaft going up into the distance turned out to be an elevator. A fact revealed by the lowering platform filled by a Krogan battle master and a small squad of Geth combat units. The lift evened at their floor with a deep clang, the unknown Krogan stepping straight off and starting without preamble in his gravelly tone, "Surrender. Or don't. That would be more fun."

Wrex growled from where he stood next to Harry and Liara. All around him the squad hefted weapons in a threatening manner, but not yet firing. There was a slim chance that this could be resolved without violence after all.

The unknown Krogan gave a deep, "Heh heh heh," and gave his really quite massive shotgun a caress, then in one motion Wrex angled _his_ shotgun from the hip and fired, not piercing the fellow's kinetic barrier but managing to throw him off balance.

The Geth opened fire.

A rocket and two plasma overcharges impacted a hastily cast shield in front of Harry, the plasma from the shots curling around his projected energy field just as the explosion blast some of the superheated particles back towards their source. In the same moment the sniper shot bounced off the leading edge of Harry's shield, bleeding so much energy that the projectile radiated into the visible spectrum. The team scattered, there was no cover to speak of but the robots demonstrated a marked ability to cause damage over a radius, and it wouldn't pay to get grouped up.

Garrus took a shot at the sniper, draining its shield, and a burst from Jenkins finished his job. Wrex ran at the unknown Krogan, hitting him with his shoulder and knocking him to the floor where he jumped astride his target and began placing the butt of his shotgun rather violently against his foe's face. For their part, Kaiden lifted the two shock troopers and the team of Ashley and Jane were polite enough to instruct the wayward synthetics in what side of the conflict had both might and right.

Benezia, her rifle still hanging at her back, thrust her hands out, and slowly crushed some invisible thing in her fists. It was an act which out of context would look quite silly, but in context resulting in a mass effect field surrounding the rocket unit and popping it's kinetic shielding like a balloon as it crushed the poor thing into a tiny cube.

Liara watched, wide eyed, as all of this took place in the span of fifteen seconds, her head still ensconced in Harry's lap. When it all was over, aside from Wrex still gleefully breaking some poor bastard's face, she looked back up at Harry. Meeting his eyes, they shared a beat of silence before he thoroughly ruined the moment by whispering, "Bloody hell not again."

\\\\-\\\

The team picked themselves up, cleaned the orange and white splatters off their faces, and commandeered the lift that had been so graciously provided for them. It brought them up to the walkway level where Wrex had been knocked about earlier. Keeping Liara covered in the middle of their group, they headed back up to the tunnel leading out of the mine, and headed to extraction.

However as they made it halfway up the tunnel, trouble called once again.

Garrus' put a hand on Ashley's back halting the advance, "Something's not right. Check your IFFs. I'm being jammed, like when we teleported in. There's a big Geth presence."

There was a general double checking of on-board armor systems, and Harry squeezed his way through the group to the front. As he passed Wrex and Ashley he interrupted the developing atmosphere of concern by waving them along and saying, "Yeah, I knew this would happen, don't worry."

The group slowly started moving again, but Tali's voice piped up from the back, "Just don't worry about enough Geth to disrupt colossus armor systems?"

Her doubt was clear, and Jane had a bad feeling that this was going to be another one of Harry's 'I'm a wizard, eat a dick' moments. She hated those.

They reached the glowing red barrier Harry left covering them on the way in and Harry casually walked through it as if nothing was there. Wrex and Ashley both hesitated at the edge of the red ward, before Harry's laughter carried back to them and with it his voice, "Hahaha! I knew this would happen. Come on through guys, that red stuff is just an illusion, it doesn't do anything."

Ashley took point, swallowing heavily before walking through and poking her head out the entrance door. She lasted half a second before she squeaked violently and jumped back in, pressing her back against the wall next to the door.

Wrex walked past the door, only to grunt and keep moving. Jane made her way to the front of the group and was the next to pass through. As soon as she saw the other side she narrowly avoided joining Ashley.

Arrayed around the area they entered were four more of the armatures, and five of the massive 'Prime' units they had encountered back on Eden Prime. In the large clearing to the right of the entrance there stood a truly massive machine, like an armature but scaled up another few levels. Each of the Geth units were looking generally in the direction of the entrance, but seemed... unable to find it? Squads of lesser units were actually holding hands and appeared to be walking a search pattern along the area in front of the entrance ramp.

For his part, Harry leaned against the handrail at the end of the entrance ramp, pointing out units to Wrex and evidently comparing designs or something. His omnitool was active and seemed to be scanning things.

Jane started forward with a growl, " _Potter..._ What in the hell am I seeing right now?"

Harry looked back at her with a smile, "I told you to have faith! I mean come on, a glowing red wall? Does that seem like my style?"

He chuckled for a moment as her anger grew, "Then what did you do! Why are we not being shot into Arcturian-Swiss cheese right now, and how the hell are we supposed to leave through all that!"

Her sweeping gesture encompassed the overwhelming show of deployed Geth forces.

"Oh Jane," Harry said, throwing an unwelcome arm around the lieutenant commander, "Have you forgotten already? I'm a wizard!"

With a loud crack the pair disappeared.

* * *

[A/N]: Next time on Getting Too Old For This: the Geth collective files libel claims against Fornax, Wrex's quad directly contributes to getting his ancestral armor back, and Liara trips in the mess area, accidentally putting her elbow in the butter.


	14. Chapter 14

**Chapter 14**

* * *

 **Serpent Nebula, Widow system, Citadel Station, Council Chambers – 06.16.2183**

"I don't know who you are, or how you hacked into this line, but we will find you, and we will find out how you did it, then we'll send you to Aru to work on a Volus press gang."

The monogender looked away from her screen to the Turian and Salarian at her sides, "They're borrowing his face. Isolate the signal and forward new, _secure_ , contacts to the Normandy."

The Turian nodded casual acceptance, and the Salarian simply got to work. With a gesture he cleared his already enormously complicated terminal and opened a wider, impenetrably complex command set. Deep inside the citadel, past barriers no organic had crossed for more than fifty thousand years, a super computer than out-massed earth's moon began spinning up. Bringing to bear processing power enough to simulate a small universe, the amphibian generated a set of encryption keys purpose-built to defy the attention of active attack AI and take an amount of time best registered in exponential notation to break. A cipher to transit the keys, a cipher transmit the frequency modulation, a new cipher for each individual bounce between the citadel and...

The ruling council of the Citadel, despite it's shortcomings, did not make things easy of it's foes. Suffice to say it was an involved and _secure_ process.

The Turian opened a comm window to C-Sec and set a task group to finding a hacker with thick enough plates to break into a Spectre's report and steal his face. The aforementioned codes were routinely changed, on occasion mid-message, so a person able to block the signal, replicate the codes, and then retransmit a live message using the face of a man who only matched his _own_ facial recognition 43.9 percent of the time was nothing short of a direct intercession of the spirits on the part of the offending computer-nerd.

Reasonable people, or for that matter hostile nation-states, didn't just do this kind of thing for fun. The law hardly stopped people no matter their species, age, or disposition, but the fact that all communication routed through beacons at each mass relay meant that the Citadel was both the hub of the relay network and the hub of the comm network. If you found the bandwidth to run a live signal one did not have to be a Quarian to be able to trace it through each of the relays to get what amounted (on a galactic scale at least) to a pinpoint accurate location on one's target.

For a Spectre's communications, especially one on a mission like that they sent that infernal Potter on, there were seven different task groups in a constant on-call rotation to ensure they had someone always on deck to track signals.

/-/

While the 'most important' being in the galaxy wasted taxpayer money and interrupted some por sod's otherwise relaxing shifts, on the other end of the connection Harry sighed and settled deeper into his chair.

Hindsight being 20/20 and all that, he really probably shouldn't have led with 'we need to destroy the citadel'.

* * *

 **Artemis Tau cluster, Knossos system, SSV Normandy – 06.19.2183**

"Oooookay. Well. We're in a holding pattern. We don't have the processing power, the fuel, or the expertise to run down the Ilos system among the hundreds the Rachni gave us, and C-Sec is still cracking encryption on some of Saren's files. Apparently the Geth like generating multi-gigabit encryption keys for fun, so naturally when they actively attempt to protect something...

When I last called for a progress update the lead investigator yelled 'shit is complicated!' at me and closed the connection by what shooting his computer. So now might be the time to bring up any personal business anyone may have, like if anyone has family they want to visit, or, get this Wrex, a friend of mine was trawling the extranet and may have found a set of eleven or twelve hundred year old Urdnot clan armor in the hands of a Turian collector."

The Krogan looked at Harry with wide and confused eyes, "What? No."

"Yeah! Funny story, she was studying the genophage, mostly because she thought it was just a disease that affected Krogan testicles. When she found out that wasn't even _almost_ correct, she just started looking up Krogan testicles, which got her onto the topic of how Krogan protect their testicles, which got her on the topic of Krogan armor, and then one thing led to another and she found your armor."

Urdnot Wrex was at first angry and grateful. Then he was just angry, then he was confused and angry, contemplative and angry, and finally just regular angry again. He wasn't used to these kind of emotional extremes, and he did not like it.

Unfortunately Kaiden's blurted question came out at the same time as Wrex's question, the deep bass of 'Where!?' nearly drowning out the 'How _do_ they protect their testicles?'

"The collector was more bragging than selling, but when she indicated an interest in buying he sent coordinates to a system out in the Argos Rho cluster. I have all the specifics in an email somewhere, I'll forward it to you when I get back to my console."

Wrex nodded once, decisively, and Harry continued, "We're headed out there anyway. The Hydra system is nice and uninhabited, a perfect destination for our more chitinous friends."

There was a terrifying sucking sound at the monitor they set up so the Rachni Queen could feel involved in the meeting, the crew felt the feelings of thankfulness she broadcast, and everyone mutually agreed to move on from the somewhat awkward experience.

"And Kaiden? You know how your armor has a cup to protect your tiny feeble human genitals?"

"Hey!"

"Krogan have a bucket."

* * *

 **Horse Head nebula, Pax system, Static discharge orbit over Svarog, SSV Normandy – 06.22.2183**

Joker's steady hand guided the Normandy's interstellar tiller northwest, where both north and west were defined in such a way that they were headed towards the Argos Rho cluster. It felt silly even in her own head, but sometimes she had to give in to these things and enjoy the moment.

Being on a ship, even just a space ship, was such a romantic notion. The Asari had moved past sailing open seas more than 3500 years previous, and even the humans were more than three hundred years distant from a time where having a wet navy was a defining socio-political factor.

It was hard to not feel a little closer to her studies in an atmosphere like that, and the space mother found her behind the med-bay helped too. It was hardly a hive of activity, but it was an important part of the ship and she felt like she had a finger on the pulse of the crew there.

But that's not where she was at the moment.

At the moment she was walking out of the ship's elevator and into the cargo bay, where the target of her current...

She wasn't prepared to use the word obsession... let's go with interest.

The target of her current interest was hunched over a workbench next to the large marine woman, apparently intent on what appeared to be a disassembled rifle.

As she approached she listened in, "So that's why your pistol didn't appear modified when I took it off you on Eden Prime?"

"Mostly. I mean for my day to day usage I never really had a need for something serious. Yeah, the occasional radish would come to life and try to burn me in my sleep, but a boot can take care of that about as well as a bullet. There was no call for a _visually_ modified thermal sink. If you looked now you'd see something a bit different."

"Different how?"

"Well you've seen heat sinks, modern ones are some kind of high tech solid state mixture of water and salt and something or other. I'm not a materials guy, I have no idea. Mine looks more like a heat sink from back around the turn of the millennium, I use a set of dozens of thin copper sheets etched with runes. It uses magic to keep the plates cool and dynamically responds to the heat output from the gun. Some of my first real technical training was in 'ancient runes'," he said making air quote, "Back in 2104. I spent a long time sort of faffing about Europe, but eventually I got bored and went back to school. I got what amounts to a PhD, my first at the time, so I usually end of defaulting to Runes when I need a static effect done reliably.

Anyway, the point is that normally when you fire your gun the thermal charge gets 'stored' in the sink until it heats up too much and you let it cool or eject it so you don't hurt the gun, this way," he said indicating his work on the table in front of him, "you fire until your target is dead or your ammo block is depleted."

"Now," he continued, brandishing a spanner, "what does this imply for your rifle?"

The marine straightened her back and looked into the distance, "If heat is no longer a concern then all the portions of the rail acceleration zones replaced with frictionless materials can be repurposed."

"Aaaaaand..."

The Marine nodded and continued, "Your magic things can just be put on any surface like a paint or marking, so there is no reason to not upgrade rifle caliber, or even put on a rail extension. You could even put on scram rails, because all the thermal drawbacks just go away," She smiled and looked back to the man in front of her, "If heat stops being a problem you might even be able to use those crazy high-ex rounds!"

"Full marks! Of course high-ex rounds designed for use in casual infantry rifles is the worst idea any R&D nerd ever came up with _ever_ ," He gestured wildly while he spoke, causing their watcher no small amount of distraction, "I can't tell you how many friends lost hands and wands to thinking explosive curses were a good idea at short range, but that's neither here nor there. The thing is, cooling is only one aspect of what I can do to one of these things. Those high-ex rounds you like run for something like one hundred thousand credits for one person's set for one engagement. I can modify the block so it never runs out, or I can modify the ammo chamber so that any block placed in it never runs out. There are runes to cancel out momentum to get rid of kick, and inverted they can be used to provide or even multiply acceleration. I can turn this rifle into an artillery piece with the same power you would find mounted on a single man space-fighter, and with a _lot_ of clever conditional modifiers, I can make it safe enough to use in a civilian area or a thinly armored transport."

His proud face shone in the light from the workbench, and his audience sat enraptured by the images his words conjured.

"That's not even counting space expansion. Imagine all those upgrades on a rifle packing mass effect engines twice the size of a normal rifle's coils. I can cannibalize parts off all our spare Mako repair kits and place mass drivers like what keeps the Mako rolling, inside the rifle. By the time I'm done you could fire from the ground at a spaceship in high orbit and still ruin someone's day!"

"Why haven't we used them already then? I could have been breaking Geth into constituent particles for days now if you can do all of this!"

"Ashley, luv, I can do all of that, but _only_ I can do all of that. What I just described would take me something like thirty man hours to meticulously carve and reinforce. One teensy mistake could find you at the heart of a small fusion event rather than your grand 'breaking into constituent atoms' plan, and while I have some ideas for those safety features, none are refined yet so I need to do a touch of my own R&D. I mean I'm a wizard but even I can only really pack sixty or seventy hours into a day."

"Sixty or seventy...?"

Harry made an 'agh' noise and waved her off, returning his attention to the rifle at his fingertips, "This is almost done, it'll be ready by the time we hit Argos Rho. It's got nearly every galactic standard upgrade I could pack onto its frame, alongside my more custom modifications and an effective, but primitive, version of a safety. You can have it then, but if you want weapons like this, or rather if you want another one so Wrex doesn't rip off your arms and beat you to death with them so he can have this one, I need you and Jane to run interference for me and give me more time. A lot is within my power, but even I can't escape time."

The marine fell silent and stared at the gun on the table. Liara hardly knew one gun from another, she could shoot a pistol straight, but that was the limit of her talent in that regard. Biotics had gotten her everywhere that her pistol had not, but even she could see the terrifying power and utility if what he was describing.

As if he could sense her thoughts, he pointed directly at her over his shoulder, "Distractions like her are just one of many things I need you to take care of if you want this."

Liara colored slightly and glared at his back, "But I-"

Ashley stood from her stool and with a gleam in her eye began advancing on the blue skinned intruder, prompting her to go "Eep!" and attempt to sidestep the marine.

"But I have to know! Mother described you as a godling, why!? She is hardly given to flights of fancy, so why would she say that!?"

Harry called Ashley off with a gesture, though the tall brunette had a decidedly grumpy air about it.

"What has she told you about me?"

Liara paused for a moment, she could sense that her next words would either get her kicked out of the cargo bay or allow her to stay and ask a few questions, so she chose carefully, "Mother told me that you were the master of death, in all that entailed."

Harry responded instantly, "And just what do you think that entails?"

She made as if to answer but he cut her off instead, "Let me ask you a question. Around one hundred seventy five years ago or so, was there a strange cultural phenomena among the Asari? Maybe a bit of a fascination with long dead technology?"

She blinked at the apparent switch in gears, but soon realized what he spoke of, it was shortly before her birth and while cultural trends weren't her area of expertise (at least not trends younger than several thousand years) she did have a bit of a connection with this.

"Yes? If I recall correctly, around that time there was a somewhat odd resurgence of interest in technology powered by pressurized water vapor. There was enough interest that a few different high end ship manufacturers came together and built a space faring vessel powered solely by steam, as well as a number of different fashion trends coinciding with that interest."

Harry gave his dirty old man smile, he would have to spend some more time looking at historical records, "And do you have any idea how that happened? What lead to people being interested in steam again?"

"Well, I have no idea," he would never know how difficult it was for her to say that either, she _had_ spent thirty years in college after all, she had a strong idea about most things, "But these things have all have a cause somewhere. Perhaps some vid?"

"Let me enlighten you. In the Earth year 2013 a group of high-society pricks in my community wanted to get rid of a steam powered train that had carried children to and from the school I attended for over a hundred years. They wanted to replace it with a more modern system. They felt that despite it's perfect function it was behind the times, reminiscent of another era, and they wanted it changed. I put my foot down and said no, and at the time I had enough of a social pull and political pull with the public that I carried the day and saved that beautiful red train. I, then still the Master of Death, personally stopped the scrapping of a steam train, in point of fact the last fully operating steam train on Earth, in the known galaxy at the time. I stopped what would have been the death of steam transportation."

Liara was very confused about the point of the story, and though she was paying close attention some portion of it must have slipped onto her face. Harry smiled.

"If you were to look into the historical records of every race in the galaxy, in whatever the local calendar conversion was, Earth year 2013 marked a strange resurgence of interest in steam technology. Particularly in the transport sector. The Asari made a steam powered clockwork spaceship. The Turians, naturally, made a series of guns. The Elcor, interestingly enough, looked into steam as a method of transport, and when it failed to meet the requirements of their high gravity world, they used that research as inspiration into exploiting phase change reactions for lift in high gravity. That went on to make their transport industry one of the most high tech and specialized in the known universe."

Harry turned to face her more directly, "I accidentally did all of that, because a train I enjoyed in my youth was going to be scrapped, and I stopped it.

"Death comes for everything. People die, yes, but ideas also die. Cells die, sanity dies, seconds die, and in the end all answer to me. An accident preventing one such death resonated across billions of cubic light-years."

She had no answer to that. How could she? How could anyone? The source of her interest just admitted to being the next best thing to omnipotent, but also being about as far from omniscient as everyone else.

The serious cast to his face melted as he took in her stunned expression, and with a short chuckle he slapped the side of the marine next to him, who had been standing stock still absorbing the conversation in front of her.

"The weird part is, your mum totally understood all of that without me having to tell her. She is one _hell_ of a woman. If I were a bit younger... well anyway. When you think of me, think of that, and when you have a handle on it, come back and we'll talk. You'll have more questions, I'm sure."

Liara nodded absently, and moved almost mechanically back to the elevator. The door closed in front of her and she stood there motionless, lost in thought, until ten minutes later Joker found himself needing to pee and called the lift up to the CIC, startling her into movement.

* * *

[A/N]: Intermission. Originally the chapter ended here, but I liked my 'Next time on…' too much to cut it.

Next time on Getting Too Old for This: We discover the real reason Joker's bones are so brittle (hint: too much masturbation), The crew plays spin the bottle to devastating effect, and Jane Shepard cuts a bitch.

* * *

 **Argos Rho cluster, Phoenix system, Tuntau – 06.23.2183**

The atmosphere of Tuntau was a thick mix of methane and helium, and as the Normandy cut through it icy clouds slipped over the wings of the ship, curling into the night.

The target: the current possessor of clan Urdnot's ceremonial armor, stolen from their burial grounds in the years following the formal end of the Krogan Rebellions.

Insertion was going to be done, finally, via Mako. The landing site was a nice open area roughly two and a half klicks north of the target's base. The team would take the Mako over the mountains directly south, approaching the base over the mountains and leaving them in an excellent position to snipe any sentries before entering the base and clearing it.

Pre-combat settings checks take into account surface gravity of 1.1 standard g and atmospheric pressure of 3.12 atm, which meant smart weapon sights, Mako suspension, and armor and vehicle seals all need to be triple checked and reset for local conditions.

Jane looked out the windows from over Joker's shoulders, appreciating what she could see of the surface. At their current height everything was cold, and beneath them the planet was so stark and blue.

Potter's intel had turned over the full names and relevant aliases of the Turian collector in possession of Wrex's family armor, and it turned out the whole group associated with the collector had death warrants for several rather violent incidents of piracy across a dozen systems in Turian space, which was the only part Jane really had an interest in. She could deal with the rampant insanity, the things that should have been against the law, the things that probably were against the law, and the continuous mild insubordination. That described her training fairly well, all things considered, but their going out on personal missions just felt...

Frivolous.

They were flying a billion credit war ship with a council Spectre, an N-7 on special assignment, a Systems alliance crew, and a ragtag group of interested third parties. Their monthly expenses were hardly a drop in the bucket of military appropriation, but they should still be out doing something worthwhile, and not just chasing down Wrex's old family armor. The stupid set of plating was more than a millennia out of date for God's sake.

Potter may have been right in that they weren't equipped or qualified for the kind of exploration their mission required, but still. There should have been a rogue nuclear device, or some kind of biotic terrorists, or some kind of goddamn crisis on Luna.

But no.

Instead they were attacking some half-wit Turian pirates and stealing collector's items from them, nominally on behalf of the Hierarchy.

Military life in general was a lot of hurry-up-and-wait scenarios, but one of the things an 'N' classification got you was an almost constant demand for your time. Jane found herself annoyed and disappointed that galactic level security issues were leaving them with enough down time to go and do what amounted to... to fetch quests.

...

At least she got to shoot people.

...

The drop happened as planned. They dropped easily and exactly in the sort-of-ice plain that they had targeted. The actual surface of the planet was a curious mix of frozen water and a natural methane composite that had a material strength close to mid-20th century kevlar. The result was a landing surface that despite being made of ice (the mostly frictionless military clusterfuck that it was) actually held a decent grip and allowed them to move around.

They landed pointed roughly west, the local weather pattern had prevailing winds headed in that direction, so Joker had shot them that way so they faced less chop coming down. They hit ground and immediately made a left, bearing south.

The terrain was... uncooperative, but they managed. Over the first ridge, and into a valley. Through that valley, and just over the next. At _that_ cusp they reached the final line of sight to the base. Jane made a point to be the first out of the Mako, and as the more martially inclined set up to fire, she sited down and caught a glimpse of the resistance.

They were pirates so, rather as a matter of course, they were undisciplined. Three Turians, radically disparate armor and weaponry, spread across a set of rag-tag barricades around the entrance to their base.

Just around the entrance. You know, the entrance that faced _away_ from the valley leading into the base and faced _towards_ the sheer cliff face they were parked on.

Good god. It's like they weren't even trying. The terrain _seriously_ gave advantage to an unconventionally placed attacking force, but that wasn't a reason to only defend against unconventionally placed enemies. There was no reason, or excuse, for it. Conventional tanks literally could not approach from that angle, only flying vehicles (which didn't have the room to land) or a Mako could approach from the cliffs, and it was a very new and fairly experimental design so there were only six or so active in the galaxy. The tank trap barriers weren't even placed so they could even _inconvenience_ an actual tank or APC.

They were letting literally any armed force that chose to follow the real topography of the land right into their base, like with a named placeholder. It was shameful, and as shameful as the whole operation was, their barricades didn't give them cover from the firing angle she currently enjoyed form the top of the cliff.

Ashley lay down with what looked like a basic Avenger class assault rifle with a set of sniper optics flash welded to the top, which raised a few questions but Jane hadn't known her to make such a serious mistake so she was willing to let it go. Next to her, Garrus lay down as well. The three of them sighted up, and as the resident wizard himself counted down, they each fired in unison, laying out the sentries before any of them could hope to alert their comrades in the base.

Unless of course they happened to be live on the mic to their friends as they each were shot in the head. Or, as she supposed, in where their heads should have been, given that Williams' rifle seemed to completely behead, and in fact be-torso the Turian she had aimed at.

The team entered the base (hilariously not code locked in any way) and assembled in the anteroom. If they were any other group of people there may have been concern for the building full of pirates on the other side of the door, but they weren't so there wasn't.

Instead they paused a second.

"Tonn Actus. A grave-robbing ass. That set of armor goes back five generations, from before our last nuclear winter, handed down from the clan leader to his successor. At the end of the 'rebellion'," Wrex said, managing a terrifying three fingered version of air quotes, "Some Turian piece of shit took it from the only sacred place Krogan have, and I haven't seen it for more than six hundred years."

There was a general nodding, but as much as Jane enjoyed the presence of the giant murder dinosaur, she just wanted to be done with this. The door opened to the inside, and they saw confirmation once more that it was a real life pirate base. All around the center of the base section there were huge stacks of crates and shelves stuffed with random equipment. In front of the door there were sections of what looked like pre-fab mine shaft entrance pieces.

What the hell kind of convoys had these idiots hit?

A voice called back, not flanged so not the Actus person, "What are you assholes doing back in here! You're on guard duty for another three hours, get your stupid bird asses outside and stare at those fucking rocks like the idiots you are!"

Jane resisted the urge to shoulder her rifle and facepalm. This was just a waste. Killing these people was a service to the galaxy. Darwin would have been grateful, or in between marveling at intelligent alien life, at least understanding.

And it was just as Jane Shepard invoked the legend of Charles Darwin that everything went to shit.

The owner of the voice that had yelled at them all to get back outside chose that instant to walk around the stack of pre-fab crap, just happening to be hefting a shotgun that glowed with the telltale plasma leakage of an overcharged shot. He likely meant to just scare the crap out of his three recently deceased friends, but instead he saw ten heavily armored enemy combatants and chose to discharge his shot into the group instead of into the roof.

Jane had been the closest to him at the time, and as his shot deflected off the edge of her kinetic barrier she got thrown forward and away from the rest of the group. Ashley, Garrus, Wrex, and Potter each snapped a shot off in response, resulting in a nasty red smear across the shelving behind the former location of the pirate, and also making the other twenty men in the base _very_ aware of their presence.

Disorganized fire immediately started pouring in from the balcony to the left, and Jane was separated from the group. Four of her teammates squeezed into the doorway to get cover and return fire, while she followed the edge of the pre-fab structure around to attempt a flanking move. If she was going to be separated, she would at least make something of it.

The crack of mass-effect fire rang out from behind her, and she heard two different voices cry out in pain from the general direction of the balcony. She casually ignored the noises of the team covering her back and moved forward. A Salarian in white and black armor poked a head out from around the edge of a crate, and she placed a neat burst of three shots two centimeters below the place where its horns met.

In her experience Salarians tended to customize and overcharge their shielding, they weren't much for heavy armor, but as far as she had seen few ever tried to correct the slight confusion in their barriers where the computer controlling them tried to cover both weird horn things.

The result was a sweet spot just below their juncture where a shot placed juuuust right resulted in... well...

Green ichor splashed all over a second Salarian who had been poking his (?) head out from just behind the first guy. Jane allowed the second fellow a moment to deal with the fact that he had blood and brain all over his face before repeating her feat and adding a few unnecesary holes to his head as well.

Folks that made a living off killing others deserved to die in just a bit of terror, she thought.

And as if on cue again, her traitorous brain spoke up in just enough time for the back door on the bottom level to open. From beyond her sight a Batarian in grey armor was revealed, with three massive striped Varren at his feet. He cried out 'KILL!' and the calls of the strange space lizard-fish-dogs reverberated through the building.

Jane _hated_ dogs.

The sound of paws and nails scraping the ground alerted her to their target (her), and for a moment they were all she could hear. Too many memories of pitbulls and German shepherds from her youth in the slums on Earth flashed through her mind. In a fleeting instant of clear reflection, she realized that in her life she had faced invasions, bullets fired from guns she couldn't understand by beings she had never heard of before, and Harry Potter. Somehow despite the fuckstorm of utter insane bullshit she had lived and triumphed through, she would always remember being eleven years old and fighting a dog with a broken bottle in an alley behind a Hindustani restaurant she had been stealing from.

By instinct and muscle memory alone she slapped rifle to shoulder blade and drew her shotgun from the small of her back. The gun expanded in just enough time for her to put a spread of pellets directly into the maw of the first one. The second came about between her and the rest of the crew, it wormed its way through a small gap between the pre-fab things and tried to pounce from behind. She wasn't rated N7 for nothing. As it jumped Jane turned and caught it in the chest with a shot, with range below two meters the shot nearly beheaded it, and she got a neat new paint job in a fine red color that she was sure she would have to spend hours cleaning off.

Jane took in her surroundings carefully, and after only hearing another pirate bite the dust from her left, she took a step back and smacked the thermal dump button on the side of her gun, giving it a second to 'reload'. As it did so she ran a hand across her face, collecting strings of what felt like Varren neck muscle. With a negligent gesture she flicked the horrific organic debris away. Shots were still pinging off the doorway behind her. Ash was in a combat firing stance, aiming the same rifle she sniped the Turian outside with. Jenkins seemed to be firing his shotgun blindly around the edge of the door frame and Garrus was resting his rifle on Potter's shoulder, and timing his shots deliberately to some unknown beat. Potter for his part was firing his pistol in the general direction of the enemy, but seemed to have his eyes closed.

Jane wanted to question that. Jane wanted to be angry. Jane's life, almost from the instant she had met Harry James Potter, had gone to shit, and she wanted to blame him for all of that. Also she wanted to shoot him. She resisted these urges through inhuman acts of will.

With a great sigh she purged herself of all thought, moving back into the void of combat. Action and reaction. Simple. All encompassing. Perfec-

A scrape. A sharp noise, but with hollow depth in its tone. A pointed object pulled across a gently textured surface. Not metallic. The surface gently textured with a polymer, a resin maybe? Not a knife, but what was it? An organic material like a-

Jane turned in an instant, and her vision filled with Varren. It had snuck up while its siblings had rushed in, waiting until they darted in for their attacks. It had climbed up on top of a crate, using the extra height to arrange its jump. Easily fifty kilos, maybe sixty, fell on top of Jane knocking her shotgun to the side and crushing her to the ground. It snapped at her, missing her head only by the grace of a centimeter.

Jane felt terror for a moment. The fucking thing's claws were _artificial_ , they glinted in the light like some kind of ceramic, and Jane understood why she hadn't heard the thing coming. Its feet were like works of some horrific Krogan art, serrated and viciously curved but padded at the same time, designed by malicious science to hide as they rended and tore.

It pulled back and lunged again for her face, but this time she was prepared enough for her right hand to shove the grip of her shotgun into its mouth to stall it. Some fucking monster had not only replaced the Varren's claws but also its teeth with those ceramic murder-death-killers. They gouged into her gun, shearing off the polymer grip and digging deeply into the receiver. Jane clenched her left hand, putting pressure on the center of her palm, she released pressure for a beat, then twice more in quick succession.

Responding to the haptic feedback her omni-tool began flash-forming, a line of diamond just an atom thick and supported by mass effect fields popped into existence, and as it was still bleeding away the massive thermal output that allowed it to exist in the first place, Jane shoved it deep into the chest of the beast.

It cut almost without resistance, cleanly slicing through three ribs, a lung, a weird organ that was very much like a kidney but definitely not, and twelve centimeters of intestine.

The Varren snapped one last time, an incisor scouring a small mark along Jane's temple, before succumbing to massive trauma and dying. It whimpered and shook, tiny convulsions driving the shard of diamond (now tens of thousands of atom lengths thick instead of hundreds) deeper into itself, more trauma, more blood, more damage.

Jane shoved it off, another negligent gesture releasing the blade into the animal, to eventually dissolve as the force that held in into being moved away. As she kneeled and shook off the viscera of a dying animal, a small pop next to her heralded the arrival of one of her team.

"Shit."

Jane wasn't sure if she said it, or if Harry had just fucking read her mind or some other fucking magic bullshit. In the corner or her eye Harry moved his hand and every piece of animal disappeared. Jane hadn't blinked, it was all just gone. Her armor looked like it had just been cleaned and shined. Her mind stopped for ten whole seconds to figure out what it was that it just saw and as it tuned back into the world around it Jane heard murmurs from the fucking insane man-god-child that was on its knees next to her.

"-een worse but for fuck's sake I can do better than this. I'm sorry."

A second of silence, not even any more gun shots from the rest of the team behind them, Jane's mind absorbed it and unintentionally added it to the file 'dogs' 'what the fuck' 'god damn it' and 'terror'.

Suddenly the side of her face stung like hornets had just gone to town, the pain sharpened her mind, bringing her to the present where she saw Potter's hand next to her, having just slapped her, and she finally caught the words he was saying, "-an make this not have happened. Jane, listen to me, I should have been on top of the dogs and I'm sorry. I knew but I thought you could do it. JANE! Blink!"

She obliged, if only to avoid the sting again. A small part of her mind, to the far back and right side, from deep in the corner, was actually processing and responding to his words.

"I can make this go away, just say yes and you will feel better, I swear on my life and magic to you I'll make sure you understand when we're back on the ship, but tell me yes and I'll make you functional again right now."

That tiny part of her mind worked hard and fast for as long as it thought it could. Memories passed in a blur, it dredged up thought she had long since buried and before she could consciously tell it otherwise that small part of her took control of her mouth and uttered a single syllable.

Then everything went dark.

* * *

 **Argos Rho cluster, Phoenix system, Low orbit over Tuntau, SSV Normandy – 06.23.2183**

 _FUCK_ it was bright.

Light bled in from every corner, from every angle, from directly inside her entire being light was just all over the goddamn place and if Jane had to make a statement on the exact level of light she would have to say that it was just a little much.

Then she opened her eyes.

After ten-ish minutes of figuring out what the fuck was going on and why the universe was just _burning_ she finally got herself together and looked around. She was in the med-bay. First bed from the right, her normal spot. The intolerable brightness came from the light on the conduit across from her bed and the two scanning arrays on the beds next to her. She blinked four or five times, and when everything finally settled her mind processed the man sitting on a stool to her left.

Unruly black hair, a generally pale disposition, and the telltale scar on the forehead.

Harry Potter.

Of course.

Jane allowed herself to go limp, falling fully back onto the pillow behind her head, closing her eyes against the light of the room.

"What's the last thing you remember?"

Jane cringed, and for once it actually went as far as touching her features. Of course he noticed.

"That bad, huh."

Jane just let herself slip back into numbness. She felt very very _very_ tired.

"So here's the thing. You sort of have PTSD."

She cringed again, but at least this time it was just internal.

"Now in a weird turn of events, it's not even due to your military career. I mean you've seen some shit, but you're hard enough to deal with all of it. It's from your childhood actually, from before you could properly deal with it, and to be fair it's not even your fault, you just have a small hippocampus. You ever notice how stuff smells weird a lot? Also," he looked away, rubbing the back of his neck, "There may be an element of 'my fault' to all of this. You and I have more history than the rest of this lot, and I've not exactly been good for your mental condition lately. I know the brunt of my bullshit is falling on you, between the outright witchcraft and the casual violation of naval protocol, you're the one properly in charge of this outfit, regardless of what it says on paper."

He stopped talking. Thank god. Jane spent about five minutes getting her shit together. It was impressive that he was taking responsibility, she hadn't survived The Villa and half a decade of black ops to fall apart because of a fucking varren on some dirtwater backwoods planet. He really had been piling it on. With some effort she managed to sit up, the bastard of course resumed.

"You've fought Batarian pirates, you've actually spent two months completely blind, which would totally destroy my tiny little mind, and you've been shot, stabbed, biotically frozen, lit on fire, and just... like Jesus man... a whole bunch of other crazy shit. You are immensely tough. You would, on your own mind you, beat out even that same mind control that got the Rachni queen. But you are still human."

He was trying to be comforting. Wonder of wonders.

"So here's the thing. As much of a dirty shitehawk as I am, I can do most of the things I claim to. I really am a master of the mental arts. It sucked _so_ much getting to that point, but I got there, and that means that I can make this right, I can help you. You're pretty traumatized by most of your childhood and teen years, you've handled it like a professional, and you've done it with style, but I can actually help make it better. If you want, and only if you want, I can go into your mind and help distance you from these events. You won't forget them, but you'll remember them with less impact than you did, letting you function normally as a human being instead of screaming internally when something that kind of looks like a dog comes near you, or when someone has a gun to one of your crew's heads."

He could help.

Almost as weird as him being comforting.

He'd been as good as his word so far. He'd pulled his weight, he'd been an ass about it, he'd been _two_ asses about it, but he'd done it. Despite his pushing her closer and closer to the edge all the time.

Maybe it was time for another risk. Jane looked him square in the eyes.

They had a hard look to them. Not like pools of light. They didn't waver, they didn't pulse, they knew exactly what they were and they had seen too much. They were immovable. One of the weirdest things about leaving a planet was the idea that as solid as it seemed, even the planets and the stars were always moving at millions of kilometers an hour. Harry's eyes looked like they were so old that if they had a mind to they would stand still even as the world around the moved on. He was probably serious.

The Tenth Street Reds.

It had been a long time since she had really thought about those racist fuckers. Maybe it was time.

With a very tight nod everything went dark again, but this time it was a special dark. One where she got to relive every stupid mistake she made from age eight to eighteen.

It was going to be a fun afternoon.

* * *

[A/N]: Next time on getting too old for this: the Rachni queen passes gas, Urdnot Wrex stabs a bitch, and the Quarians discover that the route to curing suit dependency revolves around space invaders, make of that what you will.


	15. Chapter 15

**Chapter 15**

* * *

 **Argos Rho cluster, Hydra system, High orbit over Varmalus – 06.26.2183**

The crew level of the Normandy was... oddly designed. Two stairways, an elevator, the med-bay, the XO's quarters, and a set of sleeping pods placed curiously close to the main capacitor bay for the forward rail guns. It was a floor plan that wasn't common in either the Hierarchy or the System's alliance navies, despite being a child of both design philosophies, and it resulted in an interesting set of harmonics.

Conversation even slightly above the level of normal conversation carried all the way up to the CIC, amplified somehow by the strange curves of the walls. The reverse, however, was not true. Even gunshots on the CIC level didn't carry down to the crew deck, not that Harry had checked that repeatedly in the middle of the last watch of the ship's normal 'five-and-dime' schedule.

At any rate, the curious harmonics of the deck normally filled the ship with the relative cheer of the off duty crew. From the terminals and control stations in the CIC there was always a strong sense that other people were alive and waiting to assist. A sense of community, almost.

Today though, it left something to be desired. There was laughter, Harry was involved so that was almost a certainty (his own if no one else's), but it just didn't carry the way it had in the last week or two. They said you never knew what you had until it was gone, and they were right. The whole crew felt the absence of the being that now resided on the planet turning slowly beneath them. Potter had taken great pains to ensure that she had a place in all of the conversations, so when there was rejoicing everyone felt echoes of her joy in their minds. Sadness was amplified in the same way, boredom, and on one deeply disturbing occasion that everyone had mutually agreed to never speak of again, arousal.

As sad as they were to let her go, they had to. For now, the Rachni had a queen again, and hope for the future.

The planet Varmalus was rich in alumina and borax, a set of molecules that were all very useful for an up-and-coming species, especially if they could survive with little to no oxygen. A history of volcanism lead to an immense planet-wide system of caves the Rachni could exploit, and the cooler regions held some primitive life that could work as a food source.

It was perfect.

But the crew couldn't help but feel a little selfishly abandoned. The queen was very pleasant to be around, despite her whole huge terrifying bug thing.

Which lead to most of the off duty personnel crowding the crew deck and sitting together, laughing aloud to stave off the quiet which, until recently, they hadn't even been aware was there.

"I swear you have the devil's own luck," Alexei Dubyansky's voice, in his charmingly Slavic tone, cut through most of the rest of the crew's small talk, addressed as it was to the one man they couldn't be sure wasn't literally a devil of some kind.

Harry smiled.

"You have no idea," he started, grabbing a drink and sipping at it while most of the group turned to him in curiosity, "This is, I swear to god, a true story. In my twenties a good friend of mine said something _very_ similar to me on a birthday, and it just got stuck in my head. I mean 'The Devil's Own Luck'. It's supposed to stick in your head, it's a good phrase like that. So I went out and tried to do something to see if I could test it. I went out to the nearest little corner shop, and I bought like eighty credits worth of the scratch-off lottery tickets, you know the ones. At the time, and this was back in England mind you, eighty credits was about a hundred fifty British pounds, and I had just bought the one-pound tickets, so I had stack as thick as a rifle. I sat down on someone's front steps, and took out my house keys and just got to scratching, I get through literally, this is not a joke, literally a hundred of them, and no dice. I mean by the law of averages I should've had a few in my favor, but absolutely nothing!"

Harry took another sip of his drink and the crew around him were chuckling at him, "So I go to scratch out number one hundred and one, and Oh. My. God," Harry stared into the eyes around him, "This one is a winner. Ten _thousand_ pounds, like fifty-three hundred credits, right there in my hands. Even for me at the time, this was a huge amount of money to just have in one hand there, and would you guess what happened next? Two police cars come screaming down the street following this black car, a guy pops out the window of the thing and just sprays bullets down the street," he closed an eye and pantomimed a gun in his hand, bucking wildly with imaginary recoil, "the idiot doesn't hit anyone or anything, not even the cops following them, but one stray bullet goes where the hell else, but right through my hand, the one holding the ticket! Fucking lottery commission wouldn't take it with a blood and a bullet hole through either, I'll tell you that for free."

The crew, even Garrus, broke out into laughter at that, especially when Harry held his left hand up, revealing a centimeter wide scar right in the middle of his palm, right where the bullet had gone in one side and out the other.

As the laughter subsided Harry felt a change in the atmosphere. Clearing his mind for a moment, he noticed the sort-of mental signature he knew to be Liara leaving her room behind the med-bay and making her way out to the general ruckus she could no doubt hear from where she had been working. The rest of the crew took notice when they heard the telltale whoosh of the door opening, and they took notice again when she walked up, put hands to her hips, and in a very put upon tone said, "Harry. James. Potter."

"Oooooh, you are in it now, brother. The _full_ name!"

Harry appreciated the dulcet tones of Dubyansky's accent a little less, but the general chuckling was enough for him to forgive it. Liara's face colored a sort of slightly deeper blue, and Harry could tell she was brutally suppressing the desire to stamp a foot in anger. It was for the best, they would only have laughed harder.

"Ah, the lovely Miss T'Soni."

From where she sat a few seats over, looking very smug, Benezia cleared her throat.

Harry glanced over, unrepentant, "You're the exceptionally lovely Ms. T'soni, so my comment stands, but at any rate, what can I do for you?"

"You were physically present for your species' first attempt at a settlement off planet!" it came out in a rush, if he had to guess Harry would have bet that she had been waiting for a time where she could corner him reliably with others present, and given the current crowd, she chose well, "I have a few questions."

The crowd quieted a little bit, the very watered down liquor Harry had semi-illegally brought onboard was showing itself, at least a little, in their reaction. It seemed that a bunch of curious humans finally cottoned on to the fact that they had a walking priceless historical artifact. Eyes turned to him that had previously been engaged in their own conversations.

The deck fell silent.

Harry sighed.

"And we were having so much fun. Well. You're not wrong. It was an amazing and terrible chapter in human history. What do you want to know?"

Before Liara could get to her question, Addison Chase (intel analyst from section two) spoke out, "People have always speculated on the hows and whys of the lunar colony not just dying before the military came in and took over. There's never been an honest scientific reason for it. Everyone should have died after the first riots, and that should have been all she wrote. It was definitely you, sooooo... how?"

Harry stepped up from where he was sitting on the right side of the table and began pacing a little. Liara took an absent seat and placed her chin in an adorable pose in her hands as he moved, clearly thinking a bit.

"Humanity is not the best at this," Harry said, making a vague gesture at the space around him, "We have a rather unfortunate tendency to sort of roll with an established idea or narrative rather than making a new one to fit what we see around us. So when the first lunar colony was established we made the rather idiotic mistake of having the whole thing encased in a protective dome."

Harry paused to shake his head his head in disgust, and oddly enough, of all the other species present only Wrex nodded knowingly, "I would be honestly surprised if any of you knew this, but the idea of living in a dome was common and well established as early as the 1950s or 1960s in Human culture. So lacking any true experience in these matters we went with the best sort of narrative we had, and built a huge dome of all of the best and latest tech to encase our first colony. It was the only thing that all those bloody idiotic corporations could agree on, so it got made."

Harry paused, standing at the aft-most apex of his route and looking away from the seated crew.

"Then after a year of occupation we discovered the hundred and fifty or so small holes in the dome. Everyone had noticed the minute drop in pressure. We all felt it. It was hard not to. Most folks were still working that early, real primitive He-3 mining, scooping it up off the moon's surface, so whenever we came back into the main settlement and took off our pressure suits we could tell something was wrong, at least a little."

Harry resumed his pacing, this time not meeting anyone's gaze.

"Before anyone properly did a study to verify anything, good old Mark Armstrong got it in his head that we should start paying for our air, on account of it being a real and finite commodity. Naturally we took exception to this. Then Mark got tired of being ignored and of his new tax not being paid, and he rallied the security forces he had on hand, and, well, the rest is history."

Harry sat back down, carefully not making eye contact as he remembered a few thing he'd rather wished he hadn't, "They were also idiots. The companies that paid for the colony to exist in the first place had naturally wanted things to go as well as they could, so they paid for the police officers with the best judgment and best records they could find, and despite those men being well intentioned and bright they didn't realize in the heat of the moment that discharging a firearm upward to scare a crowd might not be a good idea. Which was where all your scientific 'they should all have died' accounts come from. The first bullet alone broke through the first dome layer and bounced enough to compromise primary filtration, the rest of them broke a hole straight through. Then the decompression hit."

Harry's story had finally hit a place where the historical record that all of the humans on the crew had learned picked up. The first human colony had been planned and constructed under a dome with a diameter of one mile, something Harry was disgusted with. After all, the only countries that had used 'miles' at that point in time were the bloody United States and Myanmar. But that dome had only encompassed one point zero nine cubic kilometers of air, and it had escaped at a rate that should have killed the humans on the moon in a very, _very_ short amount of time.

"Everyone should have died. _Everyone_. Just... just bloody fucking think about that for a second. Our, rather, humanity's first attempt at leaving our planet on a permanent basis should have ended in abject failure."

There was a conspicuous silence. Harry noticed a very slight shift in local gravity, Joker made a small course correction, but everyone else actually considered how close their species had come to just not being where they were.

"It's possible to make something from nothing," Harry squinted for a second, and with a moment's real effort conjured a nice floral arrangement of four o'clock flowers in the middle of the table, "It's difficult, but possible. Now imagine for a moment what would happen if the oxygen in your blood suddenly decided it was trace energy a few moments after you had breathed it in. If that air had been anything less than permanent..."

While the crew all stared at him, Harry seemed to age a bit right in front of their eyes, "I'm powerful, very powerful even. I can do a lot. As soon as that fucking gun shot, I sprinted for the rear, hid in a bar, and just started conjuring. I didn't eat or drink or sleep for two weeks, five days, and fourteen hours. I just conjured air. I could exceed the rate that air escaped through the dome, but only by a very slim margin, and that margin disappeared by week two. A few people knew what was going on, so the place I sat became the best defended location on the moon, the name you all remember, Aldrin's Revenge. Not ten feet from me the so called 'rebels' planned the so called 'Lunar revolution', and when the people who weren't idiots finished the dome repairs on the fourteenth hour of the sixth day of the third week, I kicked a pair of teenagers out of a room on the second floor and fell asleep."

He looked around again, finally meeting the eyes that had been seeking his own.

"From there, the history you can look up and the history you remember mirrors what actually happened. I propped up the idiots fighting, the ones on the side of 'the people'," he said making air quotes, "and the ones on the side of 'the corporations'. Those... those _wankers_ spent almost three weeks fighting pointlessly while I was the only one standing between them and a death made of terror and fear. Then when the dome was fixed they focused on the problems in their comms, and they contacted Earth, and the US, the Chinese, and the Hindustani Samjhauta, and each of them sent up a fucking battalion, and suddenly with like six hundred armed people on the moon, there was peace."

Harry looked to Benezia first, then to her daughter, then the rest of the non-human element, "The weird part is, that's normal for Human history. If I didn't do it, something else would have. We, humans, are _terrible_ at this. Like they used to say about the United States, we're the _worst_ at this, except for everyone else. We are so bad at living, but we make it somehow. And that was how the lunar colony lived."

"Fucking stupid too, that's the other bit of it too, I'm no exception. I should have just repaired the dome, problem solved in twenty minutes, would've saved me a lot of pain and effort. But, hey, hindsight and all that. What can you do?"

Liara finally got the chance to meet his eyes for more than a moment, for once Harry stared into her eyes right back, and she actually remained silent for a second. She had a lot to say. The Asari had done things very differently, and she was prepared to comment on each aspect of that. She was actually board certified to comment on almost every aspect of it. Instead she took the opportunity to meet Harry's eyes and just absorb for a bit.

Liars T'Soni was one hundred six years old, which was ancient and venerable in human terms, but in Asari terms and in terms of fraction-of-life-lived, put her in the range of about an nineteen or twenty year old. She was _almost_ an adult. She very nearly grasped the world around her, she very nearly was worth consideration, and she was about to give her studied opinion, when an on duty rushed down the stairs and appeared in the crew deck.

"Sir! Mister Potter Sir!"

Harry perked up, looking directly at the person with uplifted eyebrows and a half smile on his face.

"You wanted someone to let you know when the hydrogen sulfide in the atmosphere below reached one point five percent, sir?"

Harry smiled widely, "Yes! I wanted to make a fart jok-"

Another person inexplicably followed the first down the stairs, this time sprinting and arriving out of breath. She glanced first to the man who ran down before her, before overriding him and the response he provoked to yell, " **They found it! Ilos! They found it!"**

* * *

[A/N]: Next time on Getting Too Old for This: The Illusive Man turns out to be a janitor, Jane Shepard pulls an assault rifle from a stone and becomes Queen of the Citadel, and two keepers turn out to be self aware instead of just biological automatons and they star in a buddy-cop style comedy show about doing maintenance in the constantly evolving atmosphere of the Citadel.


	16. Chapter 16

**Chapter 18**

* * *

 **Serpent Nebula, Widow system, Citadel Station – 06.26.2183**

It wasn't one of those moments.

You know the ones.

One of those instants in time where from that exact second on everything irreparably fractures, split forever into two completely distinct eras, the one before and the unrecognizably different moment after? The kind of moment that goes on in half a century to start a religion, or crash a government. A generation later it forms genuine cultural tension when children grow up after it and don't _feel_ it the same way their parents did.

This wasn't one of those.

Instead, on the other side of the galaxy, a man dressed in plain coveralls and pushing a large waste bin walked along a well-traveled path. As he walked he whistled idly, just some no-name tune from one of the forty or fifty top Asari artists of the moment. It attracted the gaze of a nearby blue-skinned feminine form, to which the man gave a tip of his cap and an only _somewhat_ lecherous wink. Said feminine form colored slightly and looked away concealing a grin behind a raised palm, leaving the man to grin as he continued along his way.

After a short time the man turned off the main path, down an otherwise unremarkable hallway. He walked, and he walked, and he kept on walking as the sounds of an active space station passed out of his hearing, leaving only the quiet shush of atmospheric processing. Taking a sudden left, he entered a final hall, leading to a seemingly pointless dead end. He stared intently at the corners of the hall, clearly looking for something, and after a moment clearly finding it.

He struck the wall nearest himself, intent on whatever he had found. When nothing happened, he frowned, and then struck the wall harder.

To his visible delight a small section of the wall lit up revealing a number pad with standard human numerals, which was interesting, as that precise keypad had not been used in nearly two hundred fifty thousand years, and had never before displayed human characters. In point of fact, the last time it had ever been active smells had played a crucial role in its operation. Undeterred by this apparent deus-ex-machina, the man began entering a sequence, a code, into the pad.

And entering.

And entering...

The code had passed the fifty digit mark, and with it the benchmark of anything resembling normal human operation. The man clearly had some cybernetic modifications, and not the boring prosthetic ones either. The exciting illegal ones that resulted in jail time, and exile from citadel space.

The code passed from one hundred fifty digit territory, and into two hundred, with the man not breaking a sweat or losing any speed. Finally after about fifteen minutes the man hit an even thousand digits, which was another interesting number, very human, very base 10.

The wall at the end of the hallway slid up silently, the man quickly entered the newly exposed corridor with his trash barrel, the wall slid closed behind him, equally quick, equally quiet, equally lost and unnoticed.

There was a sound, like a great weight shifting, then a hum heard as though from a great distance. Both were so quiet that you wouldn't have noticed them if you hadn't been looking for them specifically, and oddly enough, no one was.

The first Battle of the Citadel had begun.

* * *

 **Argos Rho cluster, Hydra system, High orbit over Varmalus – 06.26.2183**

The Turian's voice carried heavily over the connection, the dual tones interfering slightly with the patchy connection, "We got the first report in six minutes ago. We weren't sure until the orbital scans came back to us and analysts caught this."

The huge display screen behind the councilors lit up and showed a satellite's eye view of a muddy red-brown sphere, the view rapidly descended to a mere bird's eye view, and from there the point of interest became fairly obvious.

There seemed to be a trench surrounded on all sides by one of the most heinous blue-purple-black root systems Harry had ever seen, and he had been witness to Neville Longbottom being issued the first ever dis-honorable degree in Herbology. It ran for miles, cutting through a concrete jungle of Prothean structures, heading unerringly towards a massive clearing. A small creek ran through the trench, weaving around roots and fallen pylons, terminating at the clearing in a small lake right in front of the unmistakable form of a mass relay.

The conduit.

"We were, and are, somewhat hesitant to accept your conclusions, but this is difficult to misinterpret. Orders have been issued to remove the citadel side of the pair out of secure storage and into the nearest sun. The closest is over in the Boltzman system I believe."

"Wait, you didn't move it when I first asked you to? As far as you all are concerned, even if you thought I was crazy, it's just a fancy statue left behind by the Protheans. It's certainly unique but otherwise entirely pointless. Why wouldn't you even bloody _pretend_ to listen to me?"

The Asari looked away, not commenting, and Harry sighed.

"You guys hire me for a service, and then when I render that service you ignore me. If you idiots paid me, I'd demand a raise."

The three (nominally) most powerful beings, in the galaxy grumbled at him. Harry stared right back impassively, unaffected.

"If we know then it's a fair bet that the Geth already know, or will in the next few hours. I don't suppose there are any military or scientific assets anywhere in the neighborhood?"

"Some scientific, the survey teams tend to have pretty comprehensive sensors and training."

"I have one of the foremost experts in the galaxy on the Prothean extinction onboard already, alongside a galaxy-wide 99th percentile engineer. Get those teams working on a solution to move or destroy that end. I'll work a little of my voodoo-"

Sparatus looked over, mouthing the unfamiliar word, Valern instinctively passed a reference file over. He read the note, nodding an absent thank you, all while Harry continued speaking.

"We'll have to push it a little bit, but we'll be there in... a day maybe?"

Tevos raised an eyebrow, or at least where her eyebrow would be if her species had them. Valern, for his part, also seemed interested. Rather characteristically, it was the Asari that responded.

"You can cut almost two days off crossing a whole galactic radius? This comm is going out to Argos Rho, are you routing through another ship?"

Also characteristically, Harry appeared to be crunching numbers on his omni tool, not looking up, "No, no routing, but yeah, somewhere in that neighborhood probably, I've never actually tried it before buuuut... Yeah," he looked back up, "Most of that time will be me doing a little experimental maintenance."

Sparatus, as the most crotchety authority present, said, "That's not how that works."

Harry waved him off, "Six of one, half dozen of the other. The specifics don't matter. We have to beat the Geth there. Expect me there in a day or a day and a half. And will you at least beef up the fleet patrols a little? The conduit is a backdoor that Sovereign ship hopes to use to open the main door for itself. I think you can guess what the main door is."

/ - /

As Harry signed off two voices simultaneously demanded the same information, though they did so in slightly different ways.

"What are you doing to my Baby?" overlayed, "What devil craft are you committing on my ship?"

For her part the lovely Miss Zorah also seemed very interested in the answer to that question. Really the whole crew seemed rather interested. Harry's ten second calculation and two second claim broke the galactic speed record into pieces, and the ship that had set the previous record had been little more than a giant capacitor strapped to a set of engines and a cockpit.

Static discharge was the great enemy of both long distance travel and the interstellar shipping industry. Fusion cores made fuel and therefore easy power generation, immaterial, what with Helium being the second most common element in creation and all that jazz. The static charge generated by the action of the element zero core becomes the real challenge, it builds up till either it fries your electronics, or arcs into the crew space and fries your electricians.

And Harry could just beat that?

"Devil-craft is playing it a bit strong, Adams," Harry's voice and raised brows gave in almost fatherly sense of reproval, "At _best_ it's old school paganism. Even that has some historical inaccuracies, I mean it's unfair to assume they were a bunch of inbred savages when sometimes they said a man's name and he appeared in a clap of thunder wielding a hammer," Harry shook his head, bittersweet memories of the good old days, "I'll just be giving the Normandy a bit of a new paint job. It'Il be enough to get us there, maybe one more run, then it'll decay, we don't have time for anything better."

Adams gave him a... salty eye. One better suited to a man named Ishmael, "What do you mean better?"

"I don't know, I could make it stop radiating any heat, or be literally unbreakable, or stop feeling any significant static charge. I've never puttered around a ship before, planet-side has always been my speed, this is the longest I've been in space continuously… ever I think."

The engineering crew (all three of them) were almost visibly salivating, Adams spoke up again, "Well do that, do those things!"

"Look, some stuff, most stuff maybe, has already been done, like a witch-craft version of Stack Exchange. You want something colder, or on fire, or accelerated or frictionless or invisible across the IR spectrum," Harry said, pacing, "Those are solved problems. But if you want more than one of them, and for them to cooperate and not cancel each other out, and then also to not die, I need time to sit and do a bunch of shitty math. Things must be balanced, I do that, maybe just a _smidge_ of blood sacrifice, and we're there."

"I told you it was devil craft."

"Well I'll give you all the devil craft you can stomach, but _later_. When we're done. For now, I need to sit down with a few references, and Tali," the slim suited alien twitched, "You've worked with omnigel refining, yeah? I'll give you access to my stash, I'm gonna need a few hundred liters of a mix heavier in gallium, copper, and iron. Can you run that up for me?"

"Y- yes. I'll need a lot of base material. If you have human-standard composition, it's usually lighter in the basic and semi-metals so I'll need more to compensate."

Harry rummaged deep into a back pocket, pulling out an omni-gel container, a slim cylinder normally attached to a set of armor at the base of the spine, "I have enough, just... just don't question it."

Her posture was slumped a little, her shoulders down just a bit, her hands worried at the container she now held. Nervous... and resigned? There was work to do, Harry noted it and moved on.

"Adams, stay here, I'm not exactly an engineer, so I need you. The rest of you...? Well. This is it. Our enemy is a race of genocidal machines bent on the destruction of all organic life and pointed in our direction by an even older race of machines who've actually done it before. They have numerically superior forces that are closer and faster," Harry looked at his crew with a smile in his eyes, before waving a negligent hand at the lot of them in a sort of shooing motion, "You know, go tidy up your guns and pray."

And so they did, each somehow feeling just a bit better that their leader still wasn't acting serious.

* * *

 **FTL transit, location uncertain – 06.26.2183**

There were a lot of reasons she could give for what she was about to do. She was lonely. It had been a few months. She was intensely curious what it would be like. It was a sure thing. Maybe even that, despite it all, the bad boy charm _was_ worth something.

Harry Potter had a lot to offer when you looked past the surface, which was admittedly difficult. The poor man had a facade a mile thick, filled with little traps and a surprising amount of overt filth and perversion. It was _very_ difficult to look past it all, but when you got there you could see in the end it was probably worth it.

There was also a tiny part of her that, for purely scientific reasons, was _really_ curious what kind of terrifying children he must have produced. Even as a mere hundred year old (scoff) he had surely been just as clinically insane as he was at this very moment, he might have even made a good father, he was the doting type, and as... foolish as it was she just could not help being terribly, _terribly_ curious.

If she was totally honest with herself, he was hot and this was worth doing.

She had also seen enough vids in her day to know where this little adventure was going. The crew was nearing the dramatic conclusion this little adventure, so there was a reasonable chance that she may not live to be here and try again in a few days. It was almost exactly the right moment for this kind of thing, so she threw on her emergency dress behind a hastily made privacy screen on the engineering deck, and headed into the elevator to meet her destiny in the captain's quarters.

Benezia T'soni looked into a hand mirror, and she was very comfortable with what she saw.

Of course it was difficult to get to her... venerable… age without becoming very much at ease in one's own skin. She had attracted the dubious charms of little Liara's father on the eve of her own eight hundred seventy-seventh birthday after all, and her form proved the rule that Asari aged like fine wine. Nigh on a millennia, and she hadn't sagged a millimeter from where she had been as a teenager.

She shifted her hips a bit, allowing her dress to twirl around her knees. It was a slim yellow affair made in a distinctly human style. Those blessed female earthlings were just so similar to Asari on a physical level that shortly after peace had been made, both markets had veritably exploded due to the culture exchange. None of the fashion was ground-breakingly different, and human clothes certainly had a sort of technological simplicity to them that the Asari had more or less left behind, but by the goddess were there some real gems.

She wore a yellow halter dress that left her back exposed to about seven centimeters below her shoulder blades, and her legs exposed to about the same above her knee. Giving her hips another twist the hem swished slightly again in the other direction. Next to her light blue skin and darker blue freckles (another delightful human word) the color provided a strong contrast that drew the eye right along the line between the two colors, displaying her generous charms and emphasizing her species.

She was sure he would approve.

The elevator stopped, the door opened, and standing outside it holding an armful of coffee containers was none other than their illustrious pilot.

Oh joy.

The man was engaged in juggling the seven tubes he was trying to transport and not breaking any of his bones in the attempt. Benezia stepped out, her emergency heels clicking delightfully on the textured deck plating, and he entered, barely noticing anything outside his fingertips. It was petty, but a small part of her was unmistakably disappointed to not have been seen. She _had_ broken out her emergency dress after all. Naturally she turned and stood plainly in front of the door as it closed, hip cocked to the side expectantly.

Joker stabilized his load and freed a hand to punch in his destination, as the door began closing he finally managed to spare her a glance. The sight was, evidently, electrifying. He promptly dropped three of his drinks, two impacting squarely on his boot and resulting in a horrific crack that made her wince. The door closed, but she heard a muffled, "Worth it," before cursing and dropping the rest of his no doubt ill-gotten goods.

With an easier smile on her face Benezia clicked her elegant way over to the only genuinely private room on the ship, and rapped a knuckle once on the door frame before entering and locking the door behind her. She stood in the doorway striking a deceptively demure pose, her hands clutched behind her, hips set ever-so-slightly aside.

Harry was on the terminal next to the door, crunching numbers in what looked like a cuneiform script. Half of his display was taken up by a constantly updating report on the electrical charge build up in the mass effect core, and as he idly hit numbers on a keypad he was stirring a lukewarm drink with his off hand.

"I told you, Adams. Unless you want this ship to come aliv-"

Harry's gaze started at her feet, the nine centimeter heels holding his gaze for a moment, before traveling the length of her legs, raking across her body, and ending at her eyes.

"You are _not_ Adams."

"No," her smile growing, "I am not."

"Oh dear."

She fixed him to his spot with a predatory gaze. For an instant he looked longingly at the only escape, which was hardly any fun. Benezia ran a finger through the holo-interface bringing up the red locked symbol.

Benezia walked around him, trailing a finger across his shoulders, before settling in one of the chairs around the table in dining section. As he turned to once again face her, she crossed her legs and watched as his helplessly male brain did everything it could to remain... gentlemanly.

"This may not be a good idea."

Her eyes alight with mischief and promise, Benezia chose to respond with, "Hmm?"

Where he was taking this?

"I don't have a 'normal' medical history. Actually I have some... exotic chemicals floating around in my body. I was bit by a snake when I was growing up that left some fun neuro-toxins behind, I got a sort of magical anti-venin from a bird that's still floating around, I got stabbed by a big lizard that left some bone chunks behind, and that was all before I was 16. Then I grew up, and... You've seen my life. Things just kept happening, and my chemistry in here," he said waving a hand around his chest, "isn't especially safe."

"Last time I had sex was back in 2132 at the Olympics. I met a nice triathlete, and she ended up in the hospital with a heart attack. And just a tinsy bit of neurological damage. "

It was hard not to blink stupidly at the information she had just been presented with. Two really pressing questions came to mind.

"You haven't had sex in over fifty years?"

Harry smiled, "I've hosted a few orgies, but that's just because I'm an excellent orgy administrator, It's been a bit of a dry spell. Why do you think I'm so heavily invested in Fornax? I've got to have something going on."

She decided to not engage on that.

"You don't know anything about Asari physiology do you?"

Harry smile and where he directed his gaze became very lecherous.

"Certainly less than I'd like."

"Typical Asari foreplay includes a process that readies our bodies chemically for our partners. Part of why we make such a good... first contact... species."

Harry met her eyes again and with a very sharp look said, "When she woke up in the hospital one of the first things she said was that it had been worth it."

Benezia resumed her smile, "High praise for your... abilities, then."

Harry turned his chair round completely, facing her fully, "Oh Nezzie," she couldn't suppress the mild flinch at the nickname, Harry tapped the side of his head with a finger, "I've been up here, remember. You are objectively better at sex, seduction, and anything related to love than I could ever hope to be."

Benezia's expression soured for a moment, "I always forget how well you know me," she crossed her arms and looked away for a moment.

Despite being distracted by what that did to her admittedly amazing bust, Harry could not help but also notice her focus shift inward. The chair underneath her lengthened, and softened, becoming a rather cushy couch. The act of it changing startled her out of her thoughts. She looked up and over to Harry who set his wand down on his desk and moved to her side.

He put an arm around her, "I'm sorry, for what it's worth."

She sniffed haughtily, but leaned into him, allowing him to continue.

"There are like twenty or thirty better ways to have done what I did to you, but that was the fastest and we needed you and everything you have in that amazing head to make it as far as we have."

"I've lived for a thousand years, I'm not unfamiliar with need overtaking comfort," placing a hand on his chest, she cuddled a little closer.

They stayed there for a moment, each appreciating the closeness, "It's simply that you know me too well. You've 'seen behind the curtain' so to speak. It's unfair to do that to any woman, let alone one whose collected secrets for as long as I have."

"It's not all bad," Harry said and placing a hand on her knee, he looked into her eyes, "It means I know exactly what you like, and I know something you've never experienced before."

Benezia couldn't help it as her gaze trailed down to his crotch, and the bulge concealed by how he held his legs, "Indeed? And what would that be?"

His words lead her to lick her lips in anticipation.

"Good old human ingenuity."

* * *

 **Pangea Exspanse, Refuge system, High orbit over Ilos – 06.26.2183**

"The nearest viable drop site is miles away."

Joker made a noise of discontent, but was ignored.

"Given...," Jane Shepard sighed deeply and profoundly, somehow allowing a two second noise to express a lifetime of frustration and regret, "magic, we on be on top of it as soon as-"

She trailed off, gesturing to Harry with an open hand. The wizard was staring at the Normandy's sensor outputs intently.

"If you can get me within about a hundred-fifty thousand kilometers or so, I can get us in. I just need the most accurate sensor data we have, or we'll end up in a wall, which is survivable but unbelievably uncomfortable."

"Joker?"

"There are a lot of Geth in orbit. A lot," a few gestures on the pilot's part brought up a standard view of the planet in the infrared spectrum, "It looks more like a bee hive than the planet we left behind."

To his credit he was almost correct, assuming of course the local bee-equivalent used thousands of drones in geometrically precise patterns to sweep the space around their hive, and assuming again that they used overwhelming kinetic strikes to destroy any piece of debris to enter LADAR range. Not a terribly efficient strategy, but it definitely made accessing a planet unnoticed impossible for a ship running even the Normandy's impressive stealth suite.

'Thankfully', Jane was careful to use air quotes even in her head, they had a wizard on board.

"What this leaves us is what we're doing when we hit the ground. The last update before the survey ship was shot from orbit gives us some solid info, they found some slight exotic particle radiation coming from around the site of the conduit at regular interval, each about half a kilometer out from the structure. Their guess was power, given the massive cables running from the conduit to near those locations, and I'm inclined to agree. Geth forces seem to be heading to the same places, likely to get the conduit working. Now," Jane sat back, allowing her omnitool to fade away and meeting the eyes around her, "The objective is to stop activation. How?"

Garrus responded first, "How much do we want it intact?"

Harry raised a hand and tilted it back and forth, making an "eh," noise, and Kaiden stepped in to offer his two cents, "Well. I see three targets. The generators, which we don't have precise locations on, the cables, which probably require more firepower then we have to easily sever, or the thing itself, which would be difficult to secure. There are probably command and control centers somewhere where we could try to head all of this off, but we have even less intel on them, and even if we could find them the odds of the systems being fully functional are beyond low."

"Normal Turian tactics would have had us enter the system with a task force and land in battalion strength to secure all of this, so most of my experience is out."

Tali's voice poked up, only somewhat hesitantly, "If you could get me to the conduit I might be able to find a way to induce a short or a minor feedback loop. The generators were probably designed to withstand that kind of sabotage, but as old as they are, I have a chance."

"We actually might have the mobile firepower to cut the cables."

Jane snorted at Harry's thought, "Yeah, inasmuch as you are mobile. The scans have nine of these things, and only three are visibly accessible from the conduit itself. You would have to personally chase down the other six, and we only have very rough ideas on exact locations. We'd never get it done before the Geth were crawling all over us."

Harry looked a little guilty at that, a fact that Ashley immediately picked up on, grinning like a madwoman she clapped her hands in front of her and offered a comment that didn't make much sense to the rest of them, "High-ex rounds!?"

The wizard sighed, "High-ex rounds. I finished a shotgun for Wrex right before we jumped in-system."

The Krogan perked up at the thought of a new gun, especially one blessed by Harry's particular brand of crazy. A three hundred kilo lizard man perking up was hard to miss, so Harry took his cue to keep talking, "I've been working on a little something. I finally finished the math and overall designs about a day ago, and it took me a while to get it fabricated, but we have two guns that can out-shoot, actually shoot is a weak word for this, they can out... I don't know, out-murderize even the Mako's main cannon. It's a lot of complicated stuff that none of you need to know or care about," Tali made a noise of discontent and was ignored, "But suffice it to say that they can get the job done, especially if we let little miss high explosives over here off the leash."

Ashley was smiling widely and fidgeting just a bit in her chair, her eagerness to play with what she was certain would be her new favorite toy overriding all of the decorum the marines had beat into her.

"So here's what we'll do. I'll take Tali, Liara, and Benezia to the conduit itself. We'll look into shutdown protocols, overloading the generators, anything our two whiz-kids can come up with. Between the matriarch and me we should be fine, even against the firepower they have set down on it. Wrex, Garrus, and Kaiden can make up one team to go for the cables, and Ashley, Jenkins, and Shepard can make up the other. That'll give us a more or less even split and make sure we have all of the tech training where we need it. You've all still got the omni-tools I made for you?"

Wrex rumbled deeply from across the briefing room, "I've never even used a tech grenade, and even I know this thing has more power behind it than some starships. I'm not losing it."

"Good. The sensor suite should be enough to track the particle emissions and get you better idea where the cables are, or at least where they end. There's enough interference, especially with the Geth there, that you'll never be able to track the cable directly, but tracking the generators should give you a good idea."

There was general nodding. It seemed like a solid plan. There were details to quibble over, but that could be done in the armory. Most of the ground crew made to move out when Harry spoke up one last time, "Now, when I say the word 'Portkey', who feels just a little bit of fear?"

Fours hands hesitantly were raised.

"That's fair, and . I can make a sort of mobile version of my teleport. You just need to be touching it, and then say an activation phrase. If I'm not going to be physically next to you, you need an escape back off planet that you can use without me, so in case of emergency, make sure each of you has a solid grip on your right glove, and say the phrase 'Beam me up Scotty!' Got it?"

/-/

Harry and three dear friends sprang into being with a quiet pop, and as one four different guns pointed up at four different Geth Colossi, leaving only two multi-ton AI battle bots uncovered.

So, you know, good odds.

In a whisper that somehow carried over her helmet's voice synthesizer Tali asked, "You're sure they won't see us?"

Harry couldn't help but feel a little tension, and he chose to constructively channel it into sarcasm, "We're not dead yet, so yeah, pretty sure. Call it about eighty-five percent."

Liara couldn't help the desperation in her tone, "That is an uncomfortably large margin for error."

"Oh quiet, go be an archaeologist and sabotage a priceless and unique artifact of the culture you spent your life studying. Let me worry about the hordes of rampaging murder-robots."

The younger Asari blushed a little, "When you put it like that..."

Tali harrumphed and turned to the nearest visible power line, Liara following her lead. The pair quietly conversed while watching the massive Geth from the corners of their eyes, Tali ripped off a panel covering a mass wires and a dormant holo-interface, the sound bouncing around the otherwise silent valley. The two science nerds cringed at the noise, and when they distinctly _didn't_ feel hundreds of high energy shots impact their shields, they refocused on getting a holo-emitter to work.

"I expected more gunfire."

Harry smiled wickedly, not turning from his overwatch, "I'd say I'm rubbing off on you, but that feels crass," Harry could feel the heat of her blush through his armor, "Instead I'm gonna go with: Give it a minute. We'll get there."

Silence fell over them, thick and oppressive. The minor shuffling of the two behind them wasn't enough to break the mood. The atmosphere was thick on Ilos, nearly twice that of Earth, and it smelled of ozone and decay. It was enough to distract the unwary, and for beings without military grade gene-packages it would have been enough to induce an oxygen high.

From along the valley each of the Geth stood unmoving, statue-still, the perfect inhuman example of what the Normandy was fighting.

There was a crackling noise, followed by a sharp pop and the acrid tang of burnt plastic. Tali cursed quietly in Khelish, and from a reflex born more than a century in the past Harry shushed her and murmured, "Constant vigilance."

Finally, thirty minutes after planet fall, a click came in over a high band frequency. There was a beat of silence, then two more slow clicks.

As if they had been waiting for the first noise to trickle in, two more mic clicks came in rapid succession, another beat of silence, then two slow, and final, clicks.

"That's more than I was expecting."

Benezia nodded in response, but movement from across the valley caught her eye so her only response was a grunt. Harry backed up a few paces, keeping his focus on his section, until he was in conversation range with the two more learned members of the squad.

"Ash and Wrex each found two cables apiece, so that gives us two in the air. If any of these things circle around or double back on each other then they might have some of the cables you're working on right now, so we have a total of five unknowns. Is that enough to power it in spite of us?"

Liara drew a cloth from a pocket and wiped her hands, turning to face Harry, "No, it's almost certain we only have two lost cables. Prothean design is very straightforward, if there are nine generators in a circle around us then each of these cables go out in spokes, there is a very low chance they have them doubling back. I've seen some evidence of similar backup systems in other ruins, like where you found me, actually. As far as powering it? Despite our sacrilege here," Liara gazed on the spire of the tiny mass driver with something very like longing in her eyes, "I believe two unknown connections may be two too many. Prothean redundancy is legendary. Remember that there were environmental shields still active on Therum despite being exposed to active volcanism for more than fifty thousand years."

"I was afraid you might say that. If everyone got the message then things are going to get loud in fourteen minutes or so. Are you two close to something?"

Tali lay on the ground, half of her body hidden inside an open panel, the tips of her boot making small tracks in the dirt as she wiggled about. Her voice called out quietly, "I have one completely rigged to short, the second is almost done, and I think I can have the last done before time."

"Keep it up then. If Ash or Wrex get tagged by any patrols they're just going to go, so there's a chance we don't have fifteen."

As an interesting aside, of the fifteen or so intelligent species active in the galaxy, only two did _not_ have a local cultural equivalent of humanity's Murphy's Law. In original Volus, for example, the law was named for the first of the vol-clan to propose the theory of macroeconomics, mostly because he had been laughed out of his sponsoring university at the time. Even the Hanar had a version, though their version was unintelligibly complex given that it takes the form of a ten second sequence of intense bioluminescence.

Modern translators were a god send when dealing with intelligent jellyfish, as it happens.

At any rate, in an amusing cosmic coincidence, the only two species who lacked a strong cultural analogue to Murphy's Law were the Quarians and the Asari. So when the entire ground crew's omnitools lit up with an emergency data burst from the Normandy, only the people around Harry didn't understand his immediate reaction of, "Murphy you goddamn son of a bitch."

All comms cut out in the instant after the info hit, the Geth immediately filling the EM spectrum with jamming signals. The six colossi in the valley all lit up at once and began moving around, two turning to make their way to the conduit.

As the others looked on (Tali poking her head back out of the hatch), Harry played the file they received in the burst.

It was all audio, and began with a tense human voice that the back of Harry's mind connected to one of the Normandy's analysts, "Attached file broadcast to Normandy with highest priority comm codes, nonessential info stripped from file, message as follows," there was a moment of static, then the unmistakable voice of Councilor Sparatus cut in, "All Citadel military assets be advised: alert condition nightmare violet is now set. We have lost control of the station and all hardwired local defenses. All assets not engaged in operations above condition dream yellow are ordered to make best time to citadel and prepare for re-taking and defense of station. Repeat: alert condition nightmare violet is now set," the voice of the nice man from the Normandy cut back in, "Message repeats on all frequencies and channels, please contact and advise."

As the file played Geth platforms moved in force out of the brush and root systems at the edges of the valley, hundreds of them converging on the Conduit, which began humming and powering. Each of the four at the tower's base could feel slight static currents responding even inside their Colossus armor's EM shielding.

Harry looked to Tali, "Blow it. Whatever you have, fry it all now," and as his voice met the delicate audio sensors on her envirosuit the conduit visibly lurched as two massive explosions sounded in the distance from two different directions.

The slight alien dug back into the opened panel, and Harry turned and whipped his wand out, beginning to conduct a small orchestra. There was no visible effect around them, but Benezia who was looking _very_ uneasily at the approaching hundreds and Liara whose gaze was torn between Tali's work and Harry's determined face each felt a stirring they couldn't explain.

Harry muttered below their easy hearing range, and after forty-seven seconds chanting a wall of shining light spread in half of a dome between them and the approaching robot horde. Again in the distance there were two tremendous explosions, resulting in yet more twitching on the part of the mass relay next to them.

Tali scrambled back from the panel and called out, "Brace yourselves!"

There was a massive _**ZAP**_ and the two huge visible power conduits running to the relay structure caught fire and scorched everything they touched. There was a physical response in the air as the conduit didn't lurch, instead pausing completely for a moment and releasing the energy it had collected into its surroundings as a pressure wave.

Traditional physics sort of broke down in the face of the amount of eezo and charge in a mass relay, so the wave moved deceptively slowly forward defying any sense for how reality should work. Harry watched as it kicked up dust and leaves, seemingly gaining intensity instead of lessening over the distance, until it collided with the first line of Geth platforms and suddenly dissipated. The whole mass of robotic troops stopped moving for a second, and seemed to switch gears, each seeming to notice the comparatively tiny group of organics at the site of their objective.

It looked like Harry's concealing spell work wore off, or was somehow affected by the current discharge from the conduit.

Well Shit.

If he had paused to count, Harry would have noticed the three hundred seventy-nine rifle and/or cannon barrels that pointed as one in his precise direction, and simultaneously began pouring hyper-accelerated metal into the shield before him. The sound of all of the weapons discharges was overwhelming, causing the three non-humans at Harry's side to visibly flinch back, and driving Liara and Tali to raise their arms in front of themselves to try and shield their bodies from the incoming death. When they had time for their hearts to re-start pumping, and when they realized they weren't dead, the pair looked forward to see Harry grimacing with his wand outstretched.

His shouted voice barely reached them over the incoming fire, "GET UP AND MOVE! IF WE CAN GET IN FRONT OF THE CONDUIT THEY'LL HAVE TO LET UP A LITTLE, THEY DON'T WANT IT DAMAGED! I CAN'T HOLD THIS FOREVER!"

Benezia looked at him with a wild uncertainty in her eyes, explosions in the distance adding to the cacophony in front of them. She held her rifle uselessly, but with a white knuckled grip, pointed at the shield which was glowing an opaque white with the amount of energy it was redirecting and dissipating.

Tali rushed to hide behind Harry's back, her fear over the messy death he held at bay driving her to stand in contact with him, directly in his shadow. Liara looked at her in anger and betrayal, mostly as she hadn't thought to do the same first, and instead moved to the same position behind her mother, the contact adding steel to the matriarch's firing stance.

The group moved slowly, each step in time with Harry's as he slowly marched them south, to a point directly in front of the conduit. Behind them the relay was once more charging, its rings spinning up.

They made it fifteen steps before the Geth seemed to figure out their plan. The cannon fire let up slightly on them, instead redirecting to the ground they were walking toward. If they weren't able to stop them directly, the hyperintelligent toasters seemed to think they could make the organics drop their shield by forcing them to cross terrain blasted until it glowed white.

Their personal barriers flickered to life in the face of the superheated ceramacrete, slowly draining as they moved closer to the conduit, which behind them was moving faster and faster, perhaps a third of the way to full activation.

The blaring of warning indicators shook Tali out of her paralysis. Less than a month before she had just been another faceless Quarian out on her pilgrimage. Then she found herself at the center of a conflict that had become a galactic scale clusterfuck. She had never even heard of Citadel alerts above day-dream blue before today.

The sound of shield generators failing was suddenly something she could cope with though. Activating her omnitool she ran a shield boost algorithm she had customized through her armor, then through Harry's in front of her. In the ten seconds it took to get them both settled she found a bit more courage, and stepped out from behind the human to apply her fix to Liara and Benezia as well.

The three non-humans all let go of a fraction of a percent of their tension. One problem solved.

The relay was halfway to activation when they finally stepped fully in front of it. Harry visibly relaxed as he no longer had to awkwardly side step his way to their objective, and as the caliber and spread of the fire dropped down considerably. The Geth had given up on the massive energy cannons on their Colossus platforms, and the rockets from the dozens of larger bipedal platforms. They wanted the conduit active as much as Harry and company wanted out of the situation, so the gunfire became harassing instead of all-consuming-fuckstorm.

The noise produced by shots being fired and pinging off Harry's glowing shield reduced considerably, allowing conversation again. Harry took advantage of this.

"We're going through the conduit, so harden all of your shields and do what you can to prep for hard vacuum exposure."

The younger Asari looked to him with naked panic in her eyes, and in her exclamation, "WHAT!?"

"It's the only way to get to the citadel and be useful. The council has had less than sixty hours to move the other end out of secure storage, so there is no way in hell it's out yet. I'd bet anything secure storage is either on the _Destiny Ascension_ , or given how much they suck, still on the citadel somewhere. Worst case scenario we're in space when we jump out."

"N-No! We should use a portkey to get to the Normandy, we can be at the Widow relay in twenty minutes with your changes to the ship!"

Benezia looked like she agreed with her daughter, but it was hard to tell behind the diamond-hard stare it the hundreds of rifles pointed at them and the even harder grip on her gun. Tali returned behind him and began checking the seals on his armor while his attention was elsewhere. Harry took that as a vote for him.

"This is faster, and my magic on the Normandy can fail at any time even if I'm there to correct it. Trust me."

Tali's hands, despite lacking a number of fingers he was comfortable with, were quick and efficient. She finished with his armor, fitting and sealing his helmet over his head while he maintained the shield ward, before running a cursory check on her own, and moving to assist Liara who seemed stuck in terror.

The Geth didn't seem content to allow them time to prep, instead shock trooper units began racing closer under the cover of their fellow's fire. As they closed they ran to positions on the far sides of the dome, setting up in positions with lines of fire into the shield. Harry's eyes twitched madly back and forth in response, and he swung his wand left and right while still maintaining his shield, the motions resulting in two tall walls appearing to pen in the four of them and give cover from the flanking bots.

Benezia took position on the southern flank, beyond grateful to finally have something to fire at, while Harry drew his pistol in his off hand, concentration still split between the platforms on his side and the shield saving them all from becoming unsightly splatters on the ceramacrete around them. The sounds of gunfire and distant explosions still filled the air, the impact of each muted slightly for Harry now that it all had to come to him through the filter of his helmet. He was grateful, but still distracted. The HUD he'd been neglecting till that point was now screaming information at him that he didn't want. The exact number of platforms lined up against them (Four hundred twenty-two), the range and angle to the flankers (Thirty meters and closing, approaching from the north and south east around the edges of his barrier), the charge build up in the conduit behind them (approaching critical threshold of 19.722 tera-volts).

The conduit looked to be in its final phase before activation, and the flanking units reached whatever position they had been pushing for and opened fire on them. Shots passed just through the vague edges of his half dome shield, some deflecting off areas of greater intensity and most passing through only to impact on the stone Harry conjured. Benezia's steady aim caught two flankers out of cover, her tungsten rounds chewing through shields and reducing the pair to artfully designed high-tech scrap piles. Harry fired ineffectually around the top of his cover, trying to keep the robots on his side running about even if he couldn't spare the attention to properly aim.

Then of course the sentient machines had to make things worse. The shock troops must have reported back immediately about the weakness of the dome at its edges as three of the colossi at the rear of the formation reoriented their main cannons, and fired heavy plasma shots that screamed skyward at a long angle. Each shot arced up towards the edge of the dome, aiming for between the organics and the conduit.

Two shots landed properly behind them, the energy release of the blast forcing everyone off balance and forward a half step. The third hit the very edge of the solid portion of the shield, deflecting back and going off in an airburst over the team. Harry was caught still blind firing over the wall, and narrowly avoided being thrown from his feet by the airburst.

With a gasp he stopped firing his gun entirely, returning it to his side and falling to his knees to properly focus on the shield, and only on the shield. Tali and Liara watched as everything fell even further to shit in less than five seconds. Benezia managed to tag another platform, but potshots from the north side were driving her further into cover and making her less effective.

Tali was the first to move into action, slapping her fellow nerd upside the head to knock her into gear, and pulling out her shotgun. Three more blasts went off behind the dome, making her flinch, but all the same she slid into cover behind the wall Harry had conjured to the north and began firing at the shock troopers beyond it. Her last few weeks honed the instinct fleet marines tried to ingrain in her before she left the flotilla, and she took a moment to wring everything she could of what she remembered and experienced. Two wild shots forced one of the white platforms into cover behind an outcropping of rock, and while it waited a moment for its barrier to pop back up, she prepped an overcharged shot. As soon as it peeked its head out to aim her plasma round impacted its neck area, burning through the alloy and electronics and leaving a sparking hulk behind.

Tali lined up another shot but she flinched again, her blast going wild. Behind them the conduit crashed and with a massive burst of Cherenkov radiation that caused each of their barriers to fizzle again for a moment, the conduit behind them went fully active.

The time had come.

"SPRINT IT! I'LL BE RIGHT BEHIND YOU!"

All three of the non-humans took the master of death immediately at his word, and each turned and began running for the conduit. The three ran for their lives through a deadly crossfire. Shock troopers on both sides took their chance to fire rockets and plasma overcharges at the trio, but boosted shields and the strongest barrier Benezia had ever cast in her life carried them to the goal. It took them seconds to cross the forty or so meters to reach the limit of the relay's mass effect field, and as soon as they crossed it the Conduit pulsed and they disappeared from the face of the planet.

Harry still kneeled where they had left him, breathing heavily. Now he had to make it there.

Shock trooper platforms in all their shining white glory were running at him still, trying to get around the walls he conjured. On the other side of the dome shield five hundred other robots were pouring precision fire into his position.

With a wordless cry Harry stabbed his wand into the ground, anchoring the shield to the planet and its natural energies. The shield ward flickered, suddenly uncertain, and Harry rose to his feet. Turning, he stretched to one side, then the other. As Geth platforms still raced to better firing positions he bent over, touching his toes. With a final side to side move that cracked his back in a disturbing fashion, Harry crouched into a runner's starting position and pretended for a second he was back on the surface of Mars, in the Olympic village on Olympus Mons with a stern but comely female triathlete.

A smile wide on his face Harry whispered the incantation to the imperturbable charm, and ran flat out as fast as he could to the conduit. As he cleared the stone walls gunfire lanced out at him from thirty different robots, more arriving every second. The pellets bounced off of him, not even activating his kinetic barrier. He was at the base of the relay inside of five seconds, and with another titanic flash of blue, he was gone.

* * *

 **Serpent Nebula, Widow system, Citadel Station – 06.26.2183**

A Quarian and two Asari stared dumbly at the room around them. The three had been expecting a lot of things, based on differing expectations of the efficiency of government, the personal responsibility felt by different members of their species, and even on exactly how much Harry Potter could shame the top three government officials in the galaxy.

But no.

Despite that same government, those same individuals, and _all that shame_ , two Asari and a Quarian were standing with their backs to the conduit and looking out onto the closed arms of the citadel. The warm orange glow of the wards making a deceptively, almost treacherously calm scene. It was impossible to tell which ward they were in, the docking bay they stood in was sadly devoid of any useful markings. It was clear though that the council hadn't seen fit to act on the intelligence Harry, or indeed god, had given them.

Hell, the three of them could easily make out details on the presidium from here.

Almost as one they turned around, facing the machine that sent them there, their attention drawn by the massive device spinning up a little faster, as if in anticipation. From a long distance they heard a rather... girlish scream. There was a blinding flash, yet another huge pulse of Cherenkov radiation, and a black and red armored body flew screaming overhead, before impacting the inside wall with a dull thud.

The trio raced over, reaching their commander in enough time to find him discarding his helmet and coughing. Benezia helped Harry to his feet, he leaned heavily on her for a moment before the receiving end of the conduit began audibly spinning up again and the urgency managed to pierce the haze his thoughts were floating through.

Harry's looked wildly around, taking in where they were and, to his chagrin, where they were not. The second half of the Prothean races single greatest accomplishment blinded the group, and spat a Geth prime unit directly out of the bay into the space between the arms, and in the five second window good fortune gave him, Harry hefted his helmet, incanted the word _portus_ , and threw it with all of his might at the base of the Conduit. A pair of prime units popped into being, splashing the team/again with intense light and unusual radiations, then the helmet made contact and the whole structure disappeared.

Tali, Benezia, and finally Liara each pulled their guns and opened fire on the confused and slightly damaged Geth, destroying them before either had a chance to retaliate.

Harry slumped to the floor, utterly breathless, and in taking after their boss each of the aliens took a similar moment to sit down and gather themselves.

"Where did you send it?"

Harry smiled at Liara, her concern for the bloody machine's safety was writ clear in every syllable of her question. With a bark of laughter he indicated a direction generally across the axis off the citadel, out into open space, "About half a million klicks thataway. It's someone else's problem now. Fucking thing can ruin someone else's day."

And it did.

/-/

It took the better part of an hour, but between Harry's semi-infinite source of omnigel, Tali's actual ability with electronics, and two commandeered sky-cars with thoroughly invalidated warranties, the squad managed to piece together a comm powerful enough to penetrate the general ECM haze around the Citadel and make contact with the Council.

Alas, the news was not good.

"The Widow relay is locked down. We know of no technology that can de-activate a relay, especially in the face of attempts at reactivation, so we are forced to conclude that some of what you have proposed must be the truth. We are also locked out of every access to citadel systems including covert channels."

Harry had never heard Councilor Valern's voice before, and had previously made the assumption that the Salarian in question was a female. Surprises all around.

"All reports indicate a total shutdown of internal services. We've noticed no EM signatures consistent with sky car, elevator, or even airlock movement. Only noticeable change comes from gravity sensors, indicating a significant change in the mass distribution of the station. Our analysts are forced to conclude that every system has been shut down and the arms closed in preparation for something, but we have no hypothesis with any degree of certainty. Our only semi-rational guess so far is the dark space relay function you have described."

Harry resisted the urge to bang his head on the shell of the sky car they converted into a signal booster, "What can we do then? Is there any way we can do to retake control of the station since we're inside, bearing in mind that these messages are almost certainly being intercepted."

There was a heavy silence on the line, and after a pause that dragged on long enough to indicate an argument on the other side of the line, Councilor Tevos' voice answered, "Root access for all of the station's systems runs is hard wired into consoles in the council chamber. If you can secure the room and allow us remote access, we should be able to get the arms open."

"Half the station has been vented to space, so the Geth wanted you in space, they chased you lot out using good old fashioned void. Isn't the only place with the control to do something like that the council chambers then?"

"...Yes..."

"Oh good. So they're waiting for us."

"We believe that to be the case, yes."

And will that inspirational Message, Harry closed the channel.

"They know we're here. And they're getting better at reacting to me, I don't think I can just pop us into the chambers without them noticing-"

"Do your port key things have to be attached to a person?"

The egomaniacal madman in Harry was angry at being talked over, but he had thankfully mastered that aspect of himself years ago. Instead his eyes lit up with a twinkle his very _very_ old friends might have recognized. "They do not, what did you have in mind?"

"Twenty minutes won't cost us anything," Tali said, hefting his omnigel tube, "and I can make a _mean_ EM scrambler. We pop that in a second before us and it should give us at least ten seconds against even a prime unit's sensors. It's become something of a Quarian specialty."

Her final product was the size of a soccer ball, and the readings his armor was getting off it made Harry want a lead apron, the boys downstairs may have been nearly fatal to humans, but he did still have loose designs on reproduction.

With a flourish Harry produced his wand to turn the super-flashbang into a one-time port key, but as he did gravity shifted causing all four of them to lose their footing.

The human and Asari all looked around in mild panic, some version of 'Oh what the fuck now' passing through each of their minds. The Quarian on the other hand had the presence of mind to examine her omnitool instead, scanning for local Mass effect fields.

Her gentle, "Oh no...," drew the others' eyes, directing them to the space outside the cargo bay, and to the sight of bad becoming worse. The arms of the citadel opened slightly, just wide enough to allow in a terribly familiar form.

Sovereign had arrived.

The sleek curves of the super-dreadnaught passed beyond the threshold of the station, and the arms closed abruptly behind it. There was a deep and final reverberating clang as space was cut away from them again. An unlucky Turian ship failed to clear the door zone and got its nose snipped off for its trouble, atmosphere visibly streaming from the spinning section.

The ship slipped through space with a grace that would make a Tuchankan predator jealous, perching before their eyes on the tip of the council tower. Tentacles spread from what must have been its flight arrangement, and hooked into what had looked just moments ago like artistic fittings on the outside of the tower. At once, gravity nearly went out entirely in the room, and at an uneasy guess, the whole station. A moment earlier it had been the usual 1.2g, but at a guess it was around .2g now.

It was gearing up for something, power was being re-routed.

"We're out of time," Harry tapped his left gauntlet with his right, and grabbed the nearest female, "Quick before we drift."

The Asari pulsed each of their biotics to drift closer, and each touched Harry's hand. With a jab to his omnitool and then a jab from his wand, Harry armed their welcome present and sent it off. Meeting eyes with Benezia across the way, Harry took a breath and pressed his wand to the team's portkey. Each of them felt a hook grab something inside them just behind their navels, and in a whirl and a burst of color they flew outside of normal space-time. An instant of travel that left normal physics screaming and tearing out its hair in response, and they popped into the horrendous aftermath of their bomb.

In low g, bodies floated everywhere, passing slowly along parabolic arcs. The bomb caused artificial muscles to contract and twitch violently, throwing nearly thirty Geth platforms and three keepers into the air. Two Prime units stood stock still at a massive holo-control panel right in front of where the council usually stood, blinking arcs from their wrists indicating active but interrupted connections with some kind of system.

Liara took one glance at the floating robots and the dark blood spewing from the keepers floating around before vomiting forcefully out into the room, the contents of her stomach making another long arc out into the chamber.

Tali took seven seconds to deal with her second experience with a portkey, and in her remaining three seconds managed to rally to her omnitool and ping the room, marking all the Geth in the room on everyone's HUD.

Benezia recovered almost instantly, but was unfortunately the only one to not land on her feet. By the time she stood and had her rifle out in firing position, Harry put a hand atop her barrel and directed it down. She turned to him, hoping for some kind of cue. They were surrounded by the enemy and she could see some of the blinking red connections between the prime units and the citadel control restarting. Instead of a useful direction, he had his eyes closed and seemed to be chanting beneath his breath.

"- _rov-rov-Rov-ROVI ROVINDICIBILI"_

It sounded very similar to the spell he normally cast to disrupt shields. She had seen him cast it enough to be familiar with it linguistically, but this was very different. As he finished his short chant he hammered his wand hand to the ground between the four of them and a ring of visible electric energy flew out in a dome around him. It moved slower than his usual spells, which was to say at the speed of a fast jog as opposed to almost too fast to see, and just as some of the larger Geth units began twitching and restarting the wall of energy hit them.

Arcs of red, blue, and green shot off robotic forms, a few energy cells detonated violently in the face of the overwhelming force set against them, and set against the backdrop of this colorful display, Sovereign twitched imperceptibly and the arms of the citadel began opening back up.

Harry activated the magnetic soles of his boots and indicated to the others they should do the same, he helped Liara to her feet and they moved to the control station. Harry tipped the smoldering hulk of a Prime unit off the edge of the platform, and indicated Tali forward to the console.

She closed with it, and of all things connected a physical cable to a port she uncovered in the floor, at his hide Liara made a noise of agreement before leaning back into Harry's support. In the time it took Harry to cast a basic diagnostic spell at her to make sure it was just shock, Tali's electronic voice rang out.

"Keelah..."

Harry watched as the arms of the citadel moved out, opening their view to space. Small twinkles and the occasional lance of color were the only immediate indicators of the entire citadel defense fleet fighting for its life out in the darkness.

"I... I can't connect us out. All these systems are physically disconnected from everything. It's all in Sovereign's control now."

"Bloody hell," slipped from Harry's lips, sounding almost as resigned as he felt.

The arms of the citadel were almost fully extended, nearly outside their view, and small portions of the ward could be seen alternately lighting up or physically reconfiguring.

The Dark Space relay was activating in front of their eyes.

Harry handed Liara off to her mother, who had since holstered her rifle and was standing numbly, looking out at the end of her civilization. He gently led the pair of them over to one side.

As energy collected, a whine filled the air, as though an immense charge was building across a great distance. Harry shook his head once, pacing quickly in front of the supplicants dais.

He couldn't generate enough current to flash a dreadnaught's shields, at least without a planet beneath him. He hadn't thought far enough ahead, so he couldn't pocket-nuke it. Acid was out, transfiguring wasn't great through a shield, what the fuck was left to him?

God damn it.

With a whisper and a sharp flick, the surface of the ground around him cleared and was transfigured into a thick white parchment.

Cupping his hand over his mouth Harry blew gently into his palm, sparking a fire that danced over his gauntleted hand, scouring the paint and matte finish off the glove, biting deep into the armor wherever the flame licked. Harry took up a chant in a language the other three's translators didn't work on, one they had no chance of having data on as it had died out as a conversational tongue over three hundred years before humanity had seriously dreamed of space flight.

It had a lilting tone to it, disturbingly whimsical in the face of what Harry was apparently doing with the words. A swipe of his wand across his wrist didn't seem to have any visible effect, but the twirling motion above the same area drew an unmistakable red fluid from inside the armor. Harry's blood pooled in the air, oddly viscous, and using his wand as a brush with fast and efficient motions Harry drew an inverted pentagram inside a set of oddly accented chevrons. When he exhausted the pool floating above his wrist, the chant wore down, and as the final syllable passed his lips the blood blackened and scorched all paper around it.

Benezia looked at him, worry alive in her eyes, when he looked down on his work and sighed, "Just try and get me as fast as you can," the fire surrounding his gauntlet began pulsing with a fast beat, "This is going to be really, really uncomfortable."

Harry took a two shallow breaths, a deep one, then with a twist and a pop he disapparated to just outside the heavy glass composite that separated the council tower from the void.

Lot of unpleasant things can happen to an exposed body in space, certain things boiling, others expanding, the intolerable cold, the uncompromising radiation. Harry felt every instant of those tortures. It's said no one can hear you scream in space, but perhaps magic can, as he expelled his breath useless in a shout, the vibration of his call echoing only inside his own head.

 _Fiendfyre._

With a negligent gesture the bead of burning _nothing_ in his hand raced across the space between Harry and the more than two kilometer long spaceship, wrapping great tendrils around the ship. As his tongue boiled, and his face bloated and quietly burned, Harry guided the fire to the tips of Sovereign's tentacles, to where they connected to the Citadel. Kinetic barriers hardened against the radiation and force, but popped after less than a second, overwhelmed by the unholy fire, and when the fire touched Sovereign's hull where it met the Citadel Tower proper, it began expanding exponentially.

Inside the Council chambers three women entered a hastily repaired Rapid Transit cab, fleeing the sparks and the flames that cascaded across the council chamber. Above them Thessian Cherry blossoms caught fire and rained smoldering petals across the devastated center of the galactic government.

Outside the chambers, from deep behind failed kinetic barriers, breached hyper-dense armor, and unchallenged (therefore pointless) firewalls, Sovereign began to feel fear. It tried to jettison the tentacles consumed by the roaring flames, but taking the form of great cats and beasts it had no description for, the fire jumped the gaps instantly. It tried to pulse barriers to dislodge them, flood corridors with flame retardant, preemptively breach and jettison segments, and then even flood corridors with live ammunition. The flames just moved on, taking ever more exotic forms as they wound through hallways and maintenance accesses up the ship, to its core.

Blue explosions wracked the hull as containment fields failed. Atmosphere vented, and the ship died, its body consumed even after its death until nothing remained the fiendfyre consuming the mass of the starship and leaving only more void behind. In the instants before power cut completely and the flagship of the reaper fleet failed Sovereign focused on the spec floating, exposed, in the void. It felt fear, then rage, then nothing.

When Sovereign died, its death also seemed to spell the end of the Citadel. In the instant before Harry conjured the last fire, the station's arms stood fully extended and sections of the wards each lay in configurations that no living being would recognize. Energy was pooling, capacitors the size of Turian dreadnoughts were collecting charge and readying. But with the death of a machine that had itself caused a million worlds to burn, the charge meant to spark a relay pointed into the space between galaxies lay unreleased. Minimum safeties were exceeded. Fail-safes failed. The guiding intelligence behind the mass energy of a small planet flinched and died, causing the entire citadel to short.

Almost without warning the arms went dark. A Geth frigate passed too close to what looked like Zakera ward, and an arc of electricity so intense it couldn't be looked at sparked off and scorched the ship. It promptly exploded. All along the spinal segments of the arms huge rectangular masses were ejected into space from ports no one had ever suspected of even being able to move. They blasted off into the chaos of the nebula and the battle taking place there, detonating and releasing the charge that would have carried an uncountable fleet of ships into the galaxy from across a distance beyond common reckoning.

Ships piloted by organics felt discomfort, shut down, and in one or two cases where a captain had been redlining something unfortunate, they exploded. Otherwise though those same organic beings were okay, relatively safe inside sealed armor and unbreached bulkheads.

The ships piloted by digital beings faced the fury of a wave of emp that equaled, and in some places exceeded, the energy output of a late main sequence star. Despite the best EM shielding a robot could fabricate, they failed and were disrupted. Already thrown into disarray by the loss of signal from their God, the fleet splintered further.

With Sovereign's death the lockdown on the Widow relay also fell, and as soon as the lockdown fell reinforcing fleets swept in from out-system, and... pacified the area.

And the First Battle of the Citadel ended.

* * *

[A/N]: Next time on Getting Too Old For This: Sovereign's first-born son comes to the citadel seeking the man who killed his father, Joker's does a good deed with unknowable consequences, Harry meets the long-lost squib cadet branch of the Umbridge family.


	17. Chapter 17

**Chapter 19**

* * *

 **Serpent Nebula, Widow system, Citadel Station, Presidium Tower– 07.03.2183**

"You're fired."

"You wot?"

Sparatus looked away from Harry, down to the datapad he was holding in his hand. Harry hardly needed to be able to read minds to pick out the awkwardness, though being a mind reader got him access to the rage and frustration and satisfaction buried much deeper beneath the surface.

"Suspended. You're suspended."

"Is that a real thing? I mean I've never really been one for reading the handbook, but I thought I had a feel for the by-laws of your guys' little club here. Being fired, or this suspension thing, definitely don't ring any bells. Most of us die before you have to worry about it, but-"

Tevos growled over him, her omni-tool glowing faintly with constant monitors following the medigel bandage across her crests and lower back, "We made it, _special_ , just for you."

"What in the hell... why? I would've thought you'd be paying me. Maybe a medal or something, I know this is the terrifying future so like a holographic one, but still. I just..." Harry gestured helplessly at the room around him, "I spaced myself for you, which really hurts by the way."

The Turian actually met Harry's eyes, his gaze conveying genuine emotional weight behind his words, "We recognize your service and what you've done, we're thankful, but-"

"YOU BROKE THE DESTINY ASCENSION."

Some of the frustration Harry noticed lanced to the surface as Sparatus shot a look at the Asari councilor, "That's _hardly_ the most significant thing we have to replace."

They were meeting in a small secured room in the deep depths of C-Sec territory, a room which had none of the majesty that the council's former chambers had, but _did_ possess a nice window that used to look out on the presidium and the Citadel Tower. Used to.

It would take weeks to get local gravity restored, especially across the whole station, and in the meantime the Council had called Harry to one of their alternate meeting rooms. Or rather alternate-alternate, an atrocious amount of resources had been centralized in the Tower, and with it gone they were down to fourth and fifth tier resources. This room was one more easily repaired by a bog standard grav-generation field unit, so it was here they would meet their 'savior'. Harry had initially admired the room, nice curved walls and arched ceiling, it had a delightful sense of space to it despite its size, but Councilor's Tevos' shriek bounced harshly off the walls, amplified by that same curious architecture.

Harry winced.

"Hmm?"

Her Asari pride shining through, the esteemed councilor from Thessia damn near shrieked, "You _personally_ broke the Destiny Ascension. When you sent the conduit out of the docking bay you rammed it into the hull of the pride of the Asari fleet, which on top of catastrophic hull failure then meant we had to fight off the _fucking battalion_ of Geth boarders which came popping right out of the damn thing. And this is on top of you breaking the _Goddess-be-damned_ citadel."

"I... well... You're still alive?"

Somehow his hesitant tone didn't mollify the councilors. Tevos' head was still bandaged, Valern was refusing to meet his eyes more than usual, and Sparatus still seemed embarrassed. Damn Turian probably had fun getting into real combat again, and just wanted the whole thing to go away.

Into the silence Harry tried again, "In my defense, I can safely say I told you so about almost every single thing. I mean Sovereign, the Citadel being a huge relay, even the conduit. So there was a bit of damage to the station, I would think you might want me still looking into all this reaper stuff, everyone inside a ten lightyear envelope would be dead if not for me."

The Asari was just further incensed, evidently missing his last few words, "A BIT OF DAMAGE! Whatever you and that giant flying Hanar did stopped station rotation and caused complete power outages all along every ward! That's without considering that there isn't a _goddamn_ Citadel tower anymore! You crippled the center of galactic civilization, destroying a space station that has stood since the end of the Prothean race! We literally don't possess the technology to repair the segments of the Citadel you destroyed!"

"Well what would you have had me do? Did you want a mass free corridor from here to the depths of dark space to open, with god only know what on the other end of it!?"

For the first time Harry's tone matched the councilor's, and in response to him there was only silence. Tevos' fixed her eyes on his console, flicking through a number of screens and refusing to look at the agent standing before her.

"We recognize much of what you said was true, and if you had any evidence supporting any of your frankly absurd claims we may have paid more attention. You can't deny the lunacy of your own words in the context they were given to us. It is not as large of a leap of logic as any of us would like to go from what we witnessed personally to finding truth in the rest of your claims."

Tevos' eyes refused to leave her console, which still flickered from screen to screen faster than anyone could reasonably read its contents. Her voice continued to fill the space left in the air after the hum of the generator behind her.

"Th-thank you for your service. Your actions saved us from a direct invasion of the center of galactic civilization, but at an expense we are literally incapable of calculating. You just need to go. Thank you, we appreciate what you've done, now fuck off."

* * *

 **Serpent Nebula, Widow system, Citadel Station, C-Sec Academy– 07.03.2183**

The Asari were the first species in the current era, in terms of absolute chronological order, to get to space. They also claimed to be the fastest to advance to that stage, and almost as a rule were not shy about making either of those claims.

Loudly.

And at length.

From news agencies to forum trolls, the Asari were rarely shy about bringing up their superiority in technological fields, general culture, and whatever happened to be the topic at hand. A neat trait of the species, which was frequently tedious.

 _But!_ There was one field in which the classical Asari arrogance and sense of superiority were well deserved. It was one of the key technologies crucial to societal advancement, and across the galaxy was typically one of the first technological advancement found in every developing culture: Alcohol.

So as Harry returned to the Normandy with a heavy heart, he also returned with something to address that condition, namely two liters of top shelf Thessian alcohol. A brand delightfully named Elasam, it was guaranteed to make him forget his troubles, or his money back. Harry suspected a hidden pharmacological component, especially if that claim held water in a galaxy that contained Krogan, but after the month he just had, alcohol laced with drugs sounded like a fine way to wind down.

Harry paid for his purchase and made his way through the C-Sec academy to the secure berths there. If C-Sec had been high security before, when it merely held traffic control and station security, it was Double-Plus-Secure now. Additional checkpoints were set against nearly every entrance, and the older rapid-transit points had all been directed outside the section. Sadly that meant that, without Spectre credentials, the scanners he passed through flagged him and his bag of delicious intoxicants for a secondary inspection. As the officer approached, Harry couldn't help the kicked puppy expression that formed on his face. He clutched his alcohol to his chest like it was his firstborn, and prepared to do whatever he had to in order to make it to his ship with his booze intact.

Then, in a moment that proved with angelic clarity why it was so worth it to make friends in a cold and uncaring galaxy, Jeff Moreau stepped next to him and quickly shoved Harry's bag into his own. The Drell officer walked up to the pair, scowling at the pair of them. Without a word being spoken Joker presented his identification which, as a crippled ranking member of a foreign armed service, blared those two amazing words across the top: Diplomatic Immunity.

The C-Sec officer's scowl intensified to a point physically impossible by Human standards, in response Joker smiled placidly back at him, and lead Harry around the man and to the elevator to the secure ship berths.

The two men basked in silent solidarity for the first half of the nearly eternal elevator ride to their ship before Joker could no longer contain himself, "Rough day at the office?"

Harry sighed and looked away.

"I had a feeling, what with that pathetic expression on your face and you grabbing your precious cargo like it was all you had left in the world. Not many people go to 'Quarian Liquor Emporium: Very Good Cheap' so you must be celebrating something."

"They're suspending me. I'm not a Spectre any more."

Joker's eyes widened and his mouth formed a small 'O', after a moment of thought the pilot looked shrewdly at his elevator buddy, "You didn't want that job in the first place, why are you upset about this?"

Harry could hear the incredulous tone in his friend's voice, "Oh I don't give a shit about the job itself, but man, those _credentials_. I had a legal in to almost any network, I had a pass into every system and priority comm access anywhere in Citadel space, not to mention the weapon tech they had."

"Why is that even a thing you want? Do you even need it with...?" He made a vague hand gesture that Harry could only interpret as 'Magic!'

Shaking his head, he responded, "War is coming, and having that access would have been really helpful. I have a few friends that could have pulled a lot of useful data, and I neglected to do everything I could have while we were running about."

Joker looked at him seriously, "What do you know, about what is coming I mean? You killed Sovereign, no one detected any significant SOS from the thing as it died."

Harry shook his head, a rueful glint in his eyes, "I've killed the big bad guy before. Hell, I've killed the resurrected spirit form of the big bad guy before, my teenage years were a trial, let me tell you. It never ends at just one though. We don't know enough. We'll meet Sovereign's friends soon enough. It's happened before, I just wish I had seen this coming sooner. I should have."

Joker seemed to accept this, nodding and looked forward again.

"Politics get me every time, it's a bit of a personal blind spot."

From the stories Harry had related, that certainly did seem to be the case. Though if even half the things the man said were to be believed, he'd been out of the game for long enough that he could probably be forgiven for it.

As they exited the elevator to the docks from C-Sec it finally struck Harry that he just shouldn't have left bed today. Nothing would have been different, but it may have at least given him a day to bask in what felt like one hundred percent success.

Udina and Captain Anderson stood on the boarding ramp, a victorious smirk and an uncomfortable grimace painted across their respective faces.

"I can only assume you're here to do something else to bollocks up my day, so what is it going to be? The ship, isn't it?"

Anderson had difficulty meeting Harry's eyes, "Er... as you are no longer an active duty Spectre, the Alliance has withdrawn its formal support."

Joker started at the news, "It's Harry's ship! He was given command, he put his blood on it any everything."

You could see Udina's triumphant expression die as he processed Joker's words, "Ah. If you'll recall it's an alliance ship on loan to the Council officially, and Lieutenant Commander Shepard was given command."

Harry seemed resigned to it, "Seriously? Humanity as well? I sort of hoped my own species would do something for me."

Udina's expression grew teeth, "Right wing factions in the hierarchy and among the matriarchs are already talking about 'reparations' due for the damage done to the Citadel. The fifth fleet lost seven ships to collisions and battle damage in the clean up after you killed Sovereign, and you've put aliens with advanced engineering degrees onto the single most expensive naval asset the alliance has constructed in nearly fifty years."

Harry swiped a hand through his hair, looking away. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, and it probably had been, but it wasn't like he didn't see where the bastard was coming from. Udina seemed to be making it awful personal though.

"So the Alliance isn't happy?"

"No one is happy," Anderson confirmed in a monotone.

* * *

 **Serpent Nebula, Widow system, Citadel Station, Alliance Secure Berth– 07.03.2183**

Refreshing adult beverages were passed among the ground team, and to a few stragglers from the analysis section, and when that was done they collectively sat down to ask themselves and each other what in the fuck had exactly happened in the last three weeks.

Joker, in about thirty percent jest, offered in a frank tone, "You know boss, you could probably just take the ship and go."

Greico, from analysis, was also disturbingly quick to offer up his own tidbit, "Citadel traffic control is down, got hit by debris from that Turian frigate that got cut in half, I checked."

The cute redhead whose name and contact info Harry was now really regretting not remembering spoke up, "I'm prepared to be 'kidnapped' for a bit. I haven't had proper shore leave in months, you could drop me out in Asari space somewhere in a few weeks.

Harry felt a pang of sadness for the peculiarities of his biology, but shaking his head dismissed the feelings, "No, this is for the best. It's been fun, I'd forgotten what active military service is like, and being with you guys has been one of the best postings I've ever had, I mean it," Harry raised his drink and many of the other followed suit, "But really everything has been terrible since you jerks picked me up on Eden Prime, and I want to go home."

Jenkins looked up from his Alliance standard issue alcohol ration, and with curiosity in his tone asked, "What do you mean?"

His question which forced a sigh from the now former Spectre, "Well, do any of you guys know where you got those nice weapons, or the fab-rights to those nice suits of armor with each of your names on them down in the armory? Because the Alliance and the Council sure as hell didn't pay for them. I mean Christ, I could barely get them to cough up money for the fab-rights to my set. All your sets, humanoid and not, all came out of my pocket, and all of your super fancy guns. I mean Wrex," the lizard man looked up as the room's attention slipped to him, "You now carry probably the single most powerful personal weapon in the galaxy. I studied for over a decade to earn the skills I used to make it, and when I earned a mastery I was made to take oaths so I could never do what I did for you. If any one of my people were still alive I would have fallen dead where I stood for breaking them."

Harry shook his head and the room all quietly sipped their drinks, most eager to move past the awkward moment.

"So really our success can be laid at the feet of the extinction of my people, and all of the filthy pornography I've bought, sold, and otherwise traded in since I left Earth. In fact, if anyone asks, pornography paid for it all. Degenerate filth kept you all safe," he said, pointing around the room.

Ashley coughed at those particular words, some of her drink painfully coming out her nose, she managed to choke out, "Somehow I don't think that's the quote that'll make it into the history books."

Swirling his drink Harry took a sip and smiled, "But it's true none the less. Though in fairness some did come from hidden vaults of dark wizards hundreds of years ago," he said, allowing his voice to waver and making a spoooky hand gesture to go with his words, "and of the two explanations, I think I know which the Alliance News Network would find more fit to print."

"No," Harry said decisively, "This is for the best."

* * *

[A/N]: I had originally written a bit more, designed to give everyone a taste of what the events of Mass Effect 2 would be like through the lens of Harry's insanity, but upon review and re-writing I've decided to call it good here. This story should weigh in around the 80k mark, which is respectable enough for me to call it.

I've already begun work on the sequel. I don't have a title yet, but I'm getting there. The first chapter is about 30% done, and it should be a big one. For now I'll leave you with this:

* * *

 **HARRY POTTER** and **JANE SHEPARD**

WILL RETURN

in

 **GETTING TOO OLD FOR THIS 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO**


	18. Sequel Announcement

Hello! Strictly speaking, an announcement chapter is against site policy, but I think I'll roll the dice on this one. For anyone not already aware:

* * *

 **HARRY POTTER** and **JANE SHEPARD**

 **HAVE RETURNED**

in

 **Getting Too Old For This 2: Electric Boogaloo**

* * *

For anyone who enjoyed this story, I would encourage you to take a look at the sequel. The first chapter is up now, you can easily find it through my author page, or at StoryID: 13255320.


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